Consider all. Test All. Hold on to the good.

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Alexis De Tocqueville on Despotism

Alexis De Tocqueville, “What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear”, Democracy In America, Chapter VI (1835). At Project Gutenberg.
Go The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Allen Birchler on the Rhetoric of William Jennings Bryan

Allen Birchler, “The Anti-Evolutionary Beliefs of William Jennings Bryan,” Nebraska History 54 (1973): 545 – 559.
Go Bryan was very skilled in the use of the English language. Even on the cold pages of print over a quarter of a century later the pathos, humor, and sparkle of Bryan are not lost. For example, as Bryan would tell the story of the decline and fall of Darwin from grace it took on the pathos of a Greek tragedy. It was the story of the devout young Christian who had implicit faith in the infallibility of the Scriptures, but because he became involved in the theory of evolution, fell from grace, and died an embittered old man.

Jeff Yang on a Living, Breathing Constitution

Jeff Yang, "Citizenship Must Remain Our Birthright" (January 29, 2025).
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The vulnerability of birthright citizenship lies in the same thing that allows the U.S. Constitution to live and breathe and stay relevant to a changing world: textual economy. Along with the rest of the Constitution and its amendments, the 14th was deliberate with its sparse language and a lack of examples or contextual framing, in order to put exact interpretation in the hands of future generations.

Carl Trueman on Evacuating the Definition of Marriage

Carl R. Trueman, “Why Most Anglican Clergymen Now Approve of Gay Marriage — And What This Means for the Future of the Church”, First Things (September 7, 2023).
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Gay marriage does not simply involve a minor expansion of the traditional concept. There was a time when gay writers such as Andrew Sullivan argued that allowing same-sex marriages would simply permit gay people to be part of a conservative institution. It is now clear that gay marriage did not merely expand the set of those considered to be married, but fundamentally evacuated marriage of meaning — or, more accurately, exposed the fact that it had already been fundamentally evacuated of meaning by the ready acceptance of no-fault divorce. It is no longer a unique relationship whose stability is important for its normative ends, but little more than a sentimental bond that only has to last for as long as it meets the emotional needs of the parties involved.

Patrick T. Brown on Climate Science as Cassandra

Patrick T. Brown, "I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published" at The Free Press (September 5, 2023).
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To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve. 

Anika Collier Navaroli on Selective Free Speech

Anika Collier Navaroli, Twitter executive, quoted in “Free Speech for Whom?” by Jonathan Turley (February 9, 2023).
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Rep. Stansbury asked what Twitter has done and is doing to combat hate speech on its platform. Navaroli correctly declined to address current policies since she has not been at the company for some time. However, she then said that they balanced free speech against safety and explained that they sought a different approach: “Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

Martin Lloyd Jones on Faith as Thinking

Martin Lloyd Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Eerdmans : 1960), pp. 129–30.
Go Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. ... Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else …

Sam Harris and Garry Kasparov on AI and Respect for the Deep Blue team

"The Putin Question" on Making Sense, "Kasparov on the future of Artificial Intelligence". Chess News. December 29, 2016.
Go The reason I wrote the book is not to settle old scores or give my version of the match, but to say that we should not be paralyzed by a dystopian vision of the future – worrying about killer AI and super-intelligent robots, which is like worrying about overcrowding on Mars.

Buster Scruggs on the Hereafter and the Used to Be

Joel and Ethan Cohen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).
Go There's just gotta be a place up ahead Where men aren't lodown and poker's played fair If there weren't, what are all the songs about I'll see y'all there And we can sing together and shake our heads About all the meannes in the used to be

John Daniel Davidson on Content Moderation as Censorship

John Daniel Davidson, "The Twitter Files Reveal an Existential Threat", Imprimis, Vol 52, Issue 1 (January 2023).
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The Twitter Files have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state. First, the entire concept of “content moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,” as libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship.