Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" In politics, Joseph Smith was something of a radical. He preached, instead of democracy, a version of theocratic rule within a framework given by his own prophetic leadership. At Nauvoo, Smith affected a Napoleonic uniform and made himself into a general and quasi king of the polity he had constituted. "

Related Quotes:

" Even a lame-duck president can be affected by a clear midterm message if he wants to see his vice president elected and preserve his historical legacy. "

Noah Feldman

Historical

Message

Legacy

" An empire that extends itself selectively is just being prudent about its own limitations. A republic that supports democratization selectively is another matter. "

" Cyber war takes place largely in secret, unknown to the general public on both sides. "

" Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation - itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust - marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. "

" Our post-denominational age should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president, or at least the Republican nominee. Mormons share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of the evangelicals who wield disproportionate influence in primary elections. "

" Prisoners, according to the law, who are non-U.S. citizens and are detained outside the U.S. - including in Guantanamo Bay - are denied 'habeas corpus.' They are also denied the right to claim the Geneva Conventions confer certain rights on them. "

" A constitutional tradition that works is one that is in a constant state of dynamic evolution. You have a written constitution that says 'x,' but no constitutional system works if it just follows what's in that written constitution and never changes. Interpretation gives it the freedom to change. "

" The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantanamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. "

" The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative. "

" During the boom years of the 1990s, globalization emerged as the most significant development in our national life. With NAFTA and the Internet and big-box stores selling cheap goods from China, the line between national and international began to blur. "

" The great difficulty with Guantanamo is it was perceived correctly as being a place where people were not being detained subject to rules. I don't think the world thinks that you can't detain suspected terrorists - the world thinks you can do that, but you have to do it pursuant to rules and to clear charges. "

" We often imagine that the court serves as a sort of neutral umpire controlling the warring political branches. But this is mostly myth. The justices of the Supreme Court are themselves actors in the struggle for power, and when they intervene, they think carefully about how their decisions will affect the court's own legitimacy and authority. "

" The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights. "

" Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law - to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. "

" During the New Deal, people thought to be liberal was to reject socialism on one extreme and fascism on the other, and to preserve capitalism through regulation and a social safety net. "

" To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years. "

" To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story. "

" In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy. "

" Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind. "

" Faced with the collapse of Iraq into something like Lebanon - or worse, Somalia - the Bush administration opted for a new counterinsurgency strategy. Violence was reduced because, for the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqis felt that there was a force capable of dominating the situation and ensuring basic order. "

" The practical core of democracy, defined functionally, is the peaceful exchange of power between different groups of powerful political players arranged in parties. "

" William O. Douglas married not one, not two, not three, but four hot blondes. He was not faithful to any of them, not even the last, and each was younger than the previous woman... But after his personal life began to actually fall apart, he developed a set of values about the Constitution that turned out to maximize our autonomy and freedom. "

" I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state. "

" In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate. "

" Mormonism was born amid secrecy, and throughout its existence as a religion it has sustained a close yet complex relationship to the arts of silence. "

" The world is full of nations that are part of the community of nations that don't respect rights. "

" From a constitutional standpoint, the religion of a candidate is supposed to make no difference. Even before the founding fathers dreamed up the First Amendment, they inserted a provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting any religious test for office. "

Noah Feldman

Office

Constitution

" What is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith's revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity. Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time. "

" The core idea that underlies all of our democratic states, the core political idea, is this idea that it's not that one person is the sovereign; it's that all of the people are sovereign. "

" For Mitt Romney, the complex question of anti-Mormon bias boils down to the practical matter of how he can make it go away. Facing a traditional American anti-Catholicism, John F. Kennedy gave a speech during the 1960 presidential campaign declaring his private religion irrelevant to his qualifications for public office. "