Book Excerpts
Smith Scholar
In his biography of Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson writes:
“The essence of Franklin is that he was a civic-minded man. He cared more about public behavior than inner piety….The maxim he had proclaimed—“Man is a sociable being”—was reflected not only in his personal collegiality, but also in his belief that benevolence was the binding virtue of society. This gregarious outlook would lead him, as a twentysomething to launch a variety of community organizations, including a lending library, fire brigade, and night watchmen corps, and later a hospital, militia, and college. Franklin’s organizational fervor and galvanizing personality made him the most influential force in instilling this as an enduring part of American life.” In that Franklin spirit, today’s Inclusive Capitalism movement is fundamentally about creating long-term value that benefits all stakeholders – businesses, investors, employees, customers, governments, communities, members of society, and the planet. Learn from our distinguished panelists how that spirit is part of the Greater Cincinnati community.”
David McCullough, Brave Companions:
As a writer I am still drawn to the human subject, to people and their stories, more often than to large current issues or any particular field of academic inquiry. The explorer interests me more than geography, the ichthyologist more than his fish, Theodore Roosevelt before, say, the Progressive Movement. Nor have I ever been able to disassociate people or stories from their settings, the “background.” If character is destiny, so too, I believe, is terrain. Seeing how the light falls in a marble room on Capitol Hill, or smelling the coal smoke in the air on a winter night in Pennsylvania, helps in making contact with those who were there before in other days. It’s a way to find them as fellow human beings, as necessary as the digging you do in libraries. At times I’ve not known for certain whether I wanted to go ahead with a story until I have been where it happened …But then it’s fair to say my subjects are nearly all teachers. They are writers, civil engineers, men and women of science, aviators, wives and mothers, politicians …. Reading about the lives of such great figures of the nineteenth century as Mrs. Stowe, Agassiz, the Roeblings, one is struck again and again by how much they accomplished in a lifetime. Where did they find the time or energy—if only to write all those letters? Or to keep such diaries? I wonder if perhaps it was because tuning out boredom had not yet been made so easy as in our day, before commercial entertainment took over in American life. Those I have written about here nearly all led lives of active discovery and right to the last. They are immensely charged, renewed by what they do. Their work.
Maya Angelou, The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, p. 25:
“During the picking season my grandmother would get out of bed at four o’clock (she never used an alarm clock) and creak down to her knees and chant in a sleep-filled voice, “Our Father, thank you for letting me see this New Day. Thank you that you didn’t allow the bed I lay on last night to be my cooling board, nor my blanket my winding sheet. Guide my feet this day along the straight and narrow, and help me to put a bridle on my tongue. Bless this house, and everybody in it. Thank you, in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.” Before she had quite arisen, she called our names and issued orders, and pushed her large feet into homemade slippers and across the bare lye-washed wooden floor to light the coal-oil lamp.”
Quotes from the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx:
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
“The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
Mark Skousen on Marx, The Making of Modern Economics, 2nd Edition, 159-161:
“The irony is that it is capitalism, not socialism or Marxism, that has liberated the worker from the chains of poverty, war, and oppression, and have better achieved Marx’s vision of a millennium of hope and peace.”
“Could Marxism create the abundance and variety of goods and services, breakthrough technologies, and new job opportunities, and leisure time of today? Hardly!”
“Karl Marx’s ideology would take us back to a primitive, if not barbaric age of barter and tribal living without the benefit of exchange and division of labor.”
FDR, Jean Edward Smith, Chapter Fifteen, “One Hundred Days”:
“Analogies between military and political campaigns are often overdrawn, but what FDR did in rescuing the country in the first hundred days bears comparison with what General Ulysses S. Grant did in preserving the Union. Both men accepted responsibility, delegated freely, and radiated a confidence that inspired their subordinates to do their best. Roosevelt’s decisive action to save the banking system during the week following his inauguration resembles Grant’s steadfast resolution in the face of impending disaster on the battlefield. At Donelson, Shiloh, and the Wilderness, federal forces had been soundly whipped, and caution dictated a Union withdrawal. Grant counterattacked and carried the day. In March 1933 the nation’s financial structure was in chaos and disarray. Roosevelt kept his head, quietly took charge, and gave marching orders to his subordinates. “This Nation asks for action, and action now,” he said, and he was as good as his word….. The Emergency Banking Act was passed March 9, 1933; revision of the Volstead Act, March 16; the Economy Act, March 20; Civilian Conservation Corps, March 31; Federal Emergency Relief Act, May 12; Agricultural Adjustment Act, May 12; Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, May 12; Tennessee Valley Authority, May 18; Truth-in-Securities Act, May 27; abrogation of gold clauses in public and private contracts, June 5; Home Owners’ Loan Act, June 13; Glass-Steagall Banking Act, June 15; Farm Credit Act, June 15; Railroad Coordination Act, June 15; National Industrial Recovery Act, June 16, 1933.”
Mark Skousen on Hayek, The Making of Modern Economics, 2nd Edition, 301-303:
“At a meeting celebrating Hayek’s 84th birthday, the President of the Hoover Institute in referring to The Road to Serfdompraised Hayek for his courage, saying:
“At a time when socialism was dominant in Europe and especially among European intellectual circles, Hayek identified the role the socialists had played in paving the way for Adolf Hitler’s nationalist socialist party. He warned of the insidious impact of socialism on individual liberty and limited government because men entrusted with power would be tempted to exceed the constitutional constraints placed on them based on their power to exercise authority. In effect, Professor Hayek warned the West about the perils of 1984 several years before George Orwell.”
“Modern Times Revised Edition” by Paul Johnson: Marxism failure:
“The original Marxist thesis was that capitalism would collapse. That had not happened. The first fall-back position (Khrushchev’s) was that the ‘socialist bloc’ would overtake the West in living standards. That had not happened either. The second fall-back position, used from the early 1970s onwards, which was sold to the Third World and became the UN orthodoxy, was that high Western living standards, far from being the consequence of a more efficient economic system, were the immoral wages of the deliberate and systematic impoverishment of the rest of the world. Thus in 1974 the UN adopted a ‘Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States’ which condemned the workings of Western economies. The 1974 UN World Population Conference was a prolonged attack on US selfishness. The 1974 UN World Food Conference denounced America and other states, the only ones actually to produce food surpluse.
… the political terrorism was a product of moral relativism. In particular, the unspeakable cruelties it practiced were made possible only by the Marxist habit of thinking in terms of classes instead of individuals. Young radical ideologues who kept their victims chained in tiny, underground concrete dungeons, blindfolded, their ears sealed with wax, for weeks or months, then dispatched them without pity or hesitation, did not see those they tortured and murdered as human beings but as pieces of political furniture. In the process they dehumanized themselves as well as those they destroyed and became lost souls, like the debased creatures Dostoevsky described in his great anti-terrorist novel, The Devils.”
Deepak Chopra & Sarah Platt-Finger, Living in the Light, p. 5:
Take a moment to visualize some specific ways that might make your day more satisfying. Perhaps a friend tells you a piece of good news, you complete a project at work, or you watch your child or spouse smile at you and you feel a rush of love. If you rewind these experiences and evaluate them through the prism of Yoga, each event might look the same on the surface. But if you practice Royal Yoga, what happens inside is transformed: You find that you are living in the light. The effect is all-embracing, because if there is life, there should be light. What is the light? For some this is a vague spiritual term that connotes religion….Royal Yoga transcends these religious connotations while embracing their deeper meaning. “Light” is pure awareness; it is the cosmic consciousness that creates and maintains the universe and everything in it. In practical terms, living in the light is about living consciously, and the ultimate goal in life is to live only in the light, having cast off every form of ignorance, pain, and suffering.
Pamela C. Grundy and Benjamin G. Rader, The Rise of Intercollegiate Sports, 80-81:
“Unlike anywhere else in the Western world, intercollegiate sports and the pageantry accompanying them became a major feature of the American educational system in the nineteenth century. Sports helped to bind students, faculties, administrators, alumni, and social climbers into a single college community. The growth of college sports also helped to solidify the idea that competitive athletics helped young men build valuable qualities such as strength, discipline, and leadership. While a range of critics charged that sports such as football undermined the academic goals of higher education, such concerns would do little to slow the athletic expansion. Eventually, intercollegiate sports would become one of the most powerful forces in defining American college identities and giving them emotional depth.”
Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington, 1901:
“The education that I received at Hampton out of the text-books was but a small part of what I learned there. One of the things that impressed itself upon me deeply, the second year, was the unselfishness of the teachers. It was hard for me to understand how any individuals could bring themselves to the point where they could be so happy in working for others. Before the end of the year, I think I began learning that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others. This lesson I have tried to carry with me ever since. ... Perhaps the most valuable thing that I got out of my second year was an understanding of the use and value of the Bible. Miss Nathalie Lord, one of the teachers, from Portland, Me., taught me how to use and love the Bible. Before this I had never cared a great deal about it, but now I learned to love to read the Bible, not only for the spiritual help which it gives, but on account of it as literature. The lessons taught me in this respect took such a hold upon me that at the present time, when I am at home, no matter how busy I am, I always make it a rule to read a chapter or a portion of a chapter in the morning,
before beginning the work of the day.