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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Noah Feldman Quotes

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

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

Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally ‘homogeneous’ and have little experience with immigration.

– Noah Feldman

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

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.

– Noah Feldman

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

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.

– Noah Feldman

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

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

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.

– Noah Feldman

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

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.

– Noah Feldman

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

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

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

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

– Noah Feldman

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

– Noah Feldman

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

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

– Noah Feldman

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

It is often noted that it can be hard for democracies to fight wars because of changing public opinion.

– Noah Feldman

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

Every generation gets the Constitution that it deserves. As the central preoccupations of an era make their way into the legal system, the Supreme Court eventually weighs in, and nine lawyers in robes become oracles of our national identity.

– Noah Feldman

The rise of the presidency began with the Louisiana Purchase, which in 1803 doubled the land mass of the United States. History taught the framers that, just as Rome changed from republic to empire with conquest of new lands, territorial acquisition would lead to the centralization of political power.

– Noah Feldman

How can you have the religion of the sovereign be the religion of the state if the sovereign belongs to many religions? And it’s at that point, I think, historically, that you start to see people saying maybe the state should not associate itself with any religion. Maybe there shouldn’t be any official religion.

– Noah Feldman

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

– Noah Feldman