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" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Silence
Religion
Relationship
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" When we put our trust in diplomacy, it is not because it is an inspiring or uplifting discourse or because it helps us see the common humanity in others. The stylized circumlocutions of diplomats can make them seem ridiculous or irrelevant: they never seem to be talking about what is really going on. "
Noah Feldman
Trust
Humanity
Others
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Rights
Real
Majority
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Speech
Office
Down
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Idea
Person
Political
" It seems strange to the rest of the world, but we Americans can't seem to stop talking about how other countries should be democratic like we are. "
Noah Feldman
World
Talking
Rest
" The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next. "
Noah Feldman
Every Day
Power
House
" Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable. "
Noah Feldman
Early
Government
Sorry
" In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy. "
Noah Feldman
Democracy
Islam
Question
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Life
Blur
Globalization
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Own
Decisions
Power
" Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way. "
Noah Feldman
Some
Identity
Most
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Situation
Violence
Time
" Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally 'homogeneous' and have little experience with immigration. "
Noah Feldman
Sometimes
Experience
Immigration
" Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind. "
Noah Feldman
History
Fall
Empires
" 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
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Judge
History
Fitness
" After 9/11, most Americans were in no mood to talk with our enemies in the Middle East, whatever those enemies' ideology, and the Bush administration's policies of invasion and pre-emption reflected that sentiment. "
Noah Feldman
Talk
Mood
Whatever
" Cyber attacks are not what makes the cool war 'cool.' As a strategic matter, they do not differ fundamentally from older tools of espionage and sabotage. "
Noah Feldman
War
Cyber
Cool
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
True
Know
Religion
" It is often noted that it can be hard for democracies to fight wars because of changing public opinion. "
Noah Feldman
Fight
Because
Changing
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Birth
World
Reality
" FDR's justices were allies while he was alive, but after he died, they developed four totally different theories of what the Constitution is, two of which are considered conservative and two of which are considered liberal. "
Noah Feldman
Constitution
Alive
Two
" An empire that extends itself selectively is just being prudent about its own limitations. A republic that supports democratization selectively is another matter. "
Noah Feldman
Empire
Republic
Just
" In an ideological age, diplomacy may seem weak and prosaic. But sometimes it is all we have. "
Noah Feldman
Seem
Sometimes
Weak
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Motto
Years
Try
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Elections
Age
Time
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Now
True
Test
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Memory
Community
Marriage
" Like many great world faiths, Mormonism has an important strand of sacred mystery. Mormon temples have traditionally been closed to outsiders and designed with opaque windows. "
Noah Feldman
World
Great
Mystery
" 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. "
Noah Feldman
Change
Changes
Constitution