Quotes by Charles C. Cook

“Free speech is a unitary issue in which there are no possible divisions. The moral standing of the speaker has no relevance, other than in our correlated free right to judge him in turn for his actions, and it should not matter whether the person speaking is the finest man who has ever lived or the worst, nor whether or not a majority concurs with his sentiment. It must not matter whether a writer is brilliant or moronic, or a cartoonist witty or bigoted, because it is not up to power, authority, plurality or orthodoxy to make that distinction. Parliament can not be the architect of its own opposition, nor the offended the authors of their own offense. Put bluntly, the law must not distinguish between the writings of Hitler and those of Shakespeare.””

“When progressives argue that the Constitution belongs to another era, they are effectively contending that mankind has evolved beyond error and greed, and that the precautions taken by America’s careful revolutionaries are no longer necessary.””

“The sad truth is that, at one level or another, a majority of Europeans still believe in the inherent inferiority of the United States and its people, and they reject all evidence to the contrary. In the public imagination, America is the brash young houseguest: violent, forthright with opinion, unimpressed by pretentious tradition, and permanently unable to shake off an unfortunate background in trade. Europeans sigh patronizingly at the United States as a knowing parent would at an unruly child. They are envious of America’s success, yes. But envious in that peculiarly hateful sort of way in which a man might resent his ex-wife’s newfound riches.””

“Indians are still making terra preta in this way, according to Hecht, the UCLA geographer. Hecht spent years with the Kayapó, in central Amazonia, watching them create “low-biomass” fires “cool enough to walk through” of pulled-up weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds, and termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant: “To live among the Kayapó is to live in a place where parts of the landscape smolder.””

“The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize regularly grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated in hundreds of varieties, can be left in the ground for as long as a year (as long as the soil stays above 27°F), to be dug up and cooked when needed. Even frozen potatoes could be used. After letting freezing night temperatures break down the tubers’ cell walls, Andean farmers stomped out the water content to make dried chuño, a nigh-indestructible foodstuff that could be stored for years.””

“Americans exhibit a strange and inconsistent attitude toward their dropouts. In theory, this is a nation that was built by the rebels and the nonconformists”

“If all men really are created equal, the anniversary of Selma must be treated as a date every bit as important to American history as is the end of the Siege of Yorktown.””

“Modern history has judged the British colonists to be moral monsters, and Hollywood has happily played along with the conceit. In our movies and our popular culture, we commonly attribute to the king’s soldiers a series of atrocities of which they were by no means guilty, and we overstate, too, the extent to which the colonists’ basic rights were being violated. But the harsh truth of American history is that, in comparison with the tyrannies that would come later, the colonists of the 18th century had it pretty good. Theirs were the problems of political representation and of interrupted commerce, not of death and enslavement. Their fight was with a foreign power that had unwisely elected to reverse its policy of salutary neglect and to re-involve itself in the affairs of men who had all but moved on; it was not an exterminating and totalitarian force that determined to hang dissenters from trees and to assert itself as superior no matter what the injuries to liberty or to decency.””

“I don’t know why I love the open spaces in the Southwest or Grand Central Terminal or the fading Atomic Age Googie architecture you see sometimes when driving. I don’t know why merely glimpsing the Statue of Liberty brings tears to my eyes, or why a single phrase on an Etta James or Patsy Cline record does what it does to me. It just does. I have spoken to other immigrants about this, and I have noticed that there is generally a satisfactory explanation”

“The primary weakness of libertarianism is that it can become unreasonably ideological and unmoored from reality. At their very worst, libertarians can behave like Jacobins: disrespectful of tradition, convinced that logic-on-paper can answer all the important questions about the human experience, dismissive of history and cultural norms, possessed of a purifying instinct, and all too ready to pull down institutions that they fail to recognize are vital to the integrity of the society in which they wish to operate.””

“There have been approximately 200,000 years of what we generally regard as 'human history,' and in less than 1 percent of those years has it been broadly agreed that it is not entirely copacetic to remove a man’s head because he refuses to pray to your favorite god.””

“Liberty as we understand it in the United States has been the exception not the rule”

“Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history. 'Do you really think that it could happen here?' remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding 'Yes.' For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.' And 'it' was achieved”

“The primary weakness of conservatism is that, relying as it does on the Burkean presumption that society is the way it is for a reason, it can refuse too steadfastly to adapt to emerging social and economic realities and it is apt to transmute solutions that were the utilitarian product of a particular time into articles of high principle.””