Divided We Fall Quotes

“No one is more empowered by free speech than the historically marginalized and dispossessed. I’ll repeat Frederick Douglass’s declaration from 1860: free speech is the “great moral renovator of society and government.” He argued that “slavery cannot tolerate free speech” and that “five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“They” are violent. “They” are dangerous. And “we” are innocent.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“[...]Micah 6:8--to do justice, love mercy and to walk humbly with God. I would suggest that there is no solution to our national crisis absent those three cardinal virtues.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“Our nation is built from the ground up to handle political disagreement. It is not built to endure mass-scale dishonesty and vindictiveness.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“There is a need for a better American political class. But for now, there is little apparent demand. Those who care the most often hate the most, and one of their chief methods of discrediting ideological allies with whom they compete is by portraying them as too tolerant of the hated political enemy. Kindness is perceived as weakness. Decency is treated as if it’s cowardice. Acts of grace are an unthinkable concession to evil.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“Our nation is built from the ground up to handle political disagreement. It is not built to endure mass-scale dishonesty and vindictiveness. No less a light than John Adams understood our nation’s unique vulnerability to individual depravity. In his October 11, 1798, letter to the Massachusetts Militia, Adams famously wrote that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“There’s the classic conservative/progressive split—the battle of pro-life versus pro-choice or of single-payer versus market-based health care reforms. This fight rages, and it will continue to rage for the foreseeable future. The second front, however, is between those people of all political persuasions who continue to believe in constitutional processes and basic democratic norms, on the one hand, and those people who’ve adopted the anything-goes, end-justifies-the-means tactics of the campus social justice warrior or the “Flight 93” Trump populist, on the other.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1860, free speech is the “great moral renovator of society and government.” Free speech, “of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.”4”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“To put this immense time period in perspective, the Thirteenth Amendment—which abolished slavery—was ratified on December 6, 1865. We will have to live on this continent more than eighty additional years before the time after slavery will match in length the time during slavery. And if you include the century of Jim Crow that existed before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964, formal legal subjugation of African Americans endured for a stunning 345 years.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“California is now the heart of Democratic political, economic, and cultural power in the United States. In 2018 the state possessed the fifth-largest economy in the world—larger than Britain’s and only smaller than those of Germany, Japan, China, and the rest of the United States. Add Washington and Oregon to the mix, and this three-state western nation would challenge Germany for the world’s fourth-largest economy.4”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“Our nation’s angriest culture warriors need to know the cost of their conflict. As they seek to crush their political and cultural enemies, they may destroy the nation they seek to rule.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“It’s time for our warring tribes to understand a simple reality: that to embrace illiberalism and intolerance is to court dissolution.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

“It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed. At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart. We cannot assume that a continent-sized, multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy can remain united forever, and it will not remain united if our political class cannot and will not adapt to an increasingly diverse and divided American public.”
― David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation