A Thousand Small Sanities Quotes

“These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity—a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination. This just means that people make up their values, that they aren’t handed down from the past or from on high. This humanist ideal is what intersects and animates liberalism with moral energy. The opposite of humanism is not theism but fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Fanaticism is therefore the chief enemy of humanism, and fanaticism in political life is the chief enemy of the liberal ideal.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“Smith believed not that markets make men free but that free men move toward markets. The difference is small but decisive; it is most of what we mean by humanism.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“to argument, aware of human fallibility and open to the lessons of experience. An understanding that small, open social institutions, if no larger than a café or more overtly political than a park, play an outsized role in creating free minds and securing public safety. A faith in rational debate, rather than inherited ritual, and in reform, rather than either revolution or reaction. A belief in radical change through practial measures. A readiness to act—nonviolently but visibly and sometimes in the face of threatened violence—on behalf of equality. A belief that life should be fair—or fairer, or as fair as seems fair: people’s lives should not be overdetermined by who their parents were or how much money they might have inherited or what shade of skin their genes have woven. A belief that the individual pursuit of eccentric happiness can be married to a common faith in fair procedure.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma,”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“No one single person needs to be a genius or a visionary or even a great artist for the result to be permanent and to transcend generations. In the same way, the clubs we make are collectively smarter than the people we are. Reason, like musicals, emerges from the meeting of many minds.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“Liberals think it to be for the welfare of the people and the good of the country that distances should be reduced and gradually annihilated.” “Gradually annihilated”—it’s a stronger term than it may seem.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom. The reason liberals like laws is because they give us more time for everything in life that isn’t law-like. When we aren’t fighting every minute for minimal rights, or reasserting our territory, or worrying about the next clan’s claims, we can look at the stars and taste new cheeses and make love, sometimes with the wrong person. The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive. Liberalism isn't a political theory applied to life. It's what we know about life applied to a political theory. That good change happens step by step, stone by stone, and bird by bird, that we advance in life by invisible thoroughfares and, feeling our way along in their darkness, awaken to find ourselves changed and, sometimes, improved.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“ask always what’s the best real possibility, not what’s the ultimate ideal imagining.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“There is no more hard-won endorsement of the dispersal of power and authority that are central to liberalism than his. Making individuals free while making the institutions protecting freedom stronger was for Rustin a double and inseparable cause. If anyone deserves the title of radical of the real, it is him.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“When social spaces begin to be created outside the direct control of the state (including commercial ones, run for profit), civil society can start to flourish in unexpected ways. Learning just to sip alongside a stranger makes for a potable kind of pluralism.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“What happens in her fiction is always emergent, not resultant, and depends on slow processes that suddenly make people leap out into new and unseen states. As she wrote in Middlemarch, she wanted to “pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.” The unpredictable complexity of causes was clear to Eliot in her novels—but so was the eternal possibility of change.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“Lewes and Eliot between them, someone has said, a little pretentiously but not wrongly, defined the liberalism of the oikos, the Greek word for home, whereas Trollope’s is the liberalism of the polis, the city. Lewes and Eliot were more prescient of our own preoccupations: reform had to pass through the living room before it could move to Parliament.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“Each issue bore the same perfectly chosen liberal epigraph—awkwardly written, as we’ve learned that liberal epigraphs are—from Wilhelm von Humboldt, the same German thinker who had given Mill the idea of self-development: “The one idea which History exhibits as evermore developing itself into greater distinctness is the Idea of Humanity—the noble endeavor to throw down all the barriers erected between men by prejudice and one-sided views, and by setting aside the distinctions of Religion, Country and Color, to treat the whole Human race as one brotherhood.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma,”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“sometimes crazy uncles—from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism