Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World

by Jedediah Purdy
“Modernity is not the end of history.”

“With more options, people become more complicated versions of themselves – as has been
true throughout history when cultures have met.”

“What awaits us is not restricted to what we wish for, or even what we imagine.”

“For most in the Middle East, America’s political innocence was lost many decades ago, if it ever
existed.”

“The past makes us, but just as surely as we make and remake the past.”

“God has exited America.”

“There are always fanatics, but they do not usually set the path of history.”

“Because belonging means opportunity, those who don’t go along feel increasingly like Basque
speakers… left out.”

“We know the soul by what moves her.”

“The rights of Americans are, naturally, also the rights of human beings.”

“Resentment is the seed of terror.”

“Our vision is imperfect, and the ends we believe we serve may not, in the end , prove either
just or real.”

“We tend to believe that we are what we find within ourselves and what we make of it. From
the beginning we had no other way to think of ourselves.”

“Money makes vast inequality possible, because one person can become infinitely rich while
others remain poor, but it also produces a form of equality: it has the same worth in
everybody’s hands.”

“Forgetfulness keeps a people open to the world.”

“People who never forget are not likely to live together for long.”

“Give up the little home to embrace the great home.”

“With tolerance comes sloppiness and ignorance.”

“To be at home with dissatisfaction is a mark of liberal character.”

“A liberal society need not be in every way superior to other forms of life.”

“Whenever the United States is seen to betray liberal values, world opinion takes note.”

“Our greatest power is in our choice of what we display: principle, generosity, and modesty, or
opportunism, selfishness, and the pretense to innocence. Our actions teach others what to
expect from the future.”

“Often migration begins in hope, following globalized desire.”

“Diaspora is increasingly an ordinary form of political community, because we are all partly
migrants.”

“Identity is a back-and-forth between wholeness and openness, which can never be complete,
because we would dissolve into it.”

“There is an inevitable impulse to exile nationalism to the wasteland of history’s recurring evils
and watch diligently against its return.”

“The achievement of nationalism is to create a shared memory, a common sense of purpose,

and the belief in a linked fate, so that a person can declare ‘I am an….’”

“Who will you be in the next 24 hours?”

“Dependence is the most corrupting condition for a human being.”

“Economies are systems of values, and values present people with decisions. Markets do not
make our history, but only shape the circumstances in which we make it.”

“A more effective repression directs people’s own energies against freedom, given them as
much security, pleasure, and personal freedom as is compatible with the ultimate power of the
rulers.”

“It is better for the government to have power than for no one to have power.”

“Mandarin politics: one death is a scandal, many deaths are a policy.”

“… globalization means greater exploitation.”

“A people’s economic life takes place in the political house it builds for itself.”

“Dignity is inherited or taken by graft, rather than achieved by one’s own effort.”
“The empire of opinion is the strongest part of human nature, and more of the happiness and
unhappiness of mankind resides in opinion than in all other external circumstances whatever.”

“Sometimes commerce can prove a better educator in liberal values than politics.”

“The weak always have to play by the rules the strong have made.”

“The proportion between dignity and humiliation, pragmatic optimism and despair, is often
enough to decide a country’s future.”

“We conduct much of our cultural argument through images and the feelings we attach to
them.”

“Why do we spend our youth chasing money and then when we have it spend our money
chasing youth?”

“In any social order, charisma works as a currency alongside money.”

“Poverty means more than lacking money: it encompasses the lack of status as well, and the
ultimate poverty is to be outside the esteem of other people – to be socially invisible.”

“Democracy is not only political value. American government is designed to slow down politics
precisely so that spasms of fear or anger do not express themselves in law.”

“We’re the first generation to value diversity as a primary commitment. That applies
ecologically, it applies culturally, and it applies to business.”

“The power of money at high levels is often less about bribery than about gravitation.”

“The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the
State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen.”

“Power matters, though, when it finds an object: when it injures, constrains, protects, or
strengthens a person.”

“Economics is about power and dignity as well as wealth.”

“The American dream is a picture of immunity from humiliation.”

“The future is not meant for prediction, but for imagination and decision-making.”

“Uprisings happen not among the hopelessly downtrodden but when people’s hopes are
stirred, then disappointed.”

“The origin of the age of peace is not just technology; it is reason.”

“Memory is our way of weaving a whole from a world that persistently comes to us in
fragments.”