Sublime

“Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century.”

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable,”

But if James’s divine right to rule was questioned by dissenters who fled his authority, it was being questioned, too, on the floor of Parliament.

but the soil upon which these institutions are founded is more extraordinary than all the rest. When man was first placed upon the earth by the Creator, the earth was inexhaustible in its youth, but man was weak and ignorant; and when he had learned to explore the treasures which it contained, hosts of his fellow creatures covered its surface, and

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”

You cannot cure that kind of madness from a people who embrace it with such fear.

This willingness to let events work themselves out in accordance with providence, this understanding that we are at best no more than co-authors of our lives, allowed Joseph to survive without resentment about the past or despair in the face of the future. Trust in God gave him immense strength, which is what a leader needs if he is to dare greatly

lowliest organism as well as for man.