Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on Americans’ Rights and Those Who ‘Died to Win Them’)

“Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.”— U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), “Proclamation 2524—Bill of Rights Day,” Nov. 27, 1941, The American Presidency Project

Quote of the Day (Michelle Obama, Urging Graduates ‘To Protect the Ground That’s Already Been Won’)

“We’ve got a responsibility to protect the ground that’s already been won, because it can just as easily be lost. It can be gone. We’ve got a responsibility to live up to the legacy of those who came before us by doing all that we can to help those who come after us.”—Former First Lady Michelle Obama, “Remarks by the First Lady at North Carolina A&T University Commencement,” Greensboro, N.C., May 12, 2012

(The image accompanying this post, of Michelle Obama at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, was taken Aug. 23, 2024, by Armando Tinoco.)

Quote of the Day (Wendell Willkie, on Taking Away ‘The Liberties of Those We Hate’)

“For now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love. Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads. It has been woven over many centuries by the patience and sacrifice of countless liberty-loving men and women. It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and gentile, of foreign- and native-born. For God's sake, let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed, where or when man will find its protective warmth again.”—American lawyer, industrialist, and 1940 Republican Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie (1892-1944), One World (1943)

For a summary of the life and importance of this figure who would be wildly out of step with the current GOP, see my post from a dozen years ago.

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Truth, Freedom, and Justice)

“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.” —French novelist, essayist, and playwright—Nobel Literature laureate—Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Three Interviews,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1970)

The loss to the world when Albert Camus died in an automobile accident 65 years ago today is incalculable. At only 46 years old, he was still in the prime of his career.

His death came at a tricky time for the novelist: France’s divisive, debilitating attempt to crush the independence movement of the colony where Camus was born and spent his formative years, Algeria. As a pacifist, he was so anguished by the Algerian War that he said it affected him “as others feel pain in their legs.”

Like his counterpart across the English Channel, George Orwell, Camus issued a clarion call for liberal democracy when it was threatened by totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right. The successors of these two writers are issuing their own warnings about similar perils that confront our age, but so far they are going unheeded.

Maybe it’s time to re-read Camus, to understand, as he demonstrated in his postwar novel The Plague (much discussed at the outbreak of COVID-19), that withstanding pestilences, whether the medical or political kind, requires eternal vigilance lest they return, but ordinary people must maintain their resistance, no matter how great their weariness.

(For a more extended overview of how Camus balanced political activism with engaging with time “on the smallest and most personal scale,” see Maria Popova’s June 2024 post from her blog “The Marginalian.”)

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, on Writers Who Can ‘Imagine Real Grounds for Hope’)

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”—Sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), “Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,” Nov. 19, 2014

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Freedom)

“The noble craftsman we promote,
Disown the knave and fool;
Each honest man shall have his vote,
Each child shall have his school.
For what avail the plow or sail,
Or land, or life, if freedom fail?”—American essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Boston,” in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1876

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on the Need to ‘Favor Freedom’ Over Resignation)

“People are too readily resigned to fatality. They are too ready to believe that, after all, nothing but bloodshed makes history progress and that the stronger always progresses at the expense of the weaker. Such fatality exists perhaps. But man's task is not to accept it or to bow to its laws. If he had accepted it in the earliest ages, we should still be living in prehistoric times. The task of men of culture and faith, in any case, is not to desert historical struggles nor to serve the cruel and inhuman elements in those struggles. It is rather to remain what they are, to help man against what is oppressing him, to favor freedom against the fatalities that close in upon it.” —French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria” (February 1956), in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien (1961)

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Franzen, on ‘The Dream of Limitless Freedom’)

“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.” —American novelist Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel (2010)

Quote of the Day (Niccolo Machiavelli, on Cities and Freedom)

“Cities have never expanded either in dominion or in riches if they have not been in freedom.”— Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Discourses on Livy (1517)

Song Lyric of the Day (Tom Petty, on Being ‘Far Away From Your Trouble and Worries’)

“Far away from your trouble and worries
You belong somewhere you feel free.”—American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Tom Petty (1950-2017), title cut of his CD Wildflowers (1994)

Song Lyric of the Day (Tears for Fears, on What to do When ‘Nothing Ever Lasts Forever’)

“Help me make the most

 Of freedom and of pleasure

Nothing ever lasts forever.” — “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” written by Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes, from the Tears for Fears CD Songs From the Big Chair (1985)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on the ‘Smug Justification of Oppression’)

“Today freedom has not many allies. I have been known to say that the real passion of the twentieth century was slavery….I…wanted to express that anguish I feel every day when faced with the decrease of liberal energies, the prostituting of words, the slandered victims, the smug justification of oppression, the insane admiration of force. We see a multiplication of those minds of whom it has been said that they seemed to count an inclination towards slavery as an ingredient of virtue. We see the intelligence seeking justifications for its fear, and finding them readily, for every cowardice has its own philosophy. Indignation is measured, silences take counsel from one another, and history has ceased to be anything but Noah's cloak that is spread over the victims' obscenity. In short, all flee real responsibility, the effort of being consistent or having an opinion of one's own, in order to take refuge in the parties or groups that will think for them, express their anger for them, and make their plans for them.”—French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), "Homage to an Exile," originally a speech delivered Dec. 7, 1955 at a banquet in honor of President Eduardo Santos, editor of El Tiempo, driven out of Colombia by the dictatorship, republished in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien (1961)

Quote of the Day (Jill Lepore, on ‘A Nation Founded on Revolution and Universal Rights’)

“At the close of the Cold War, some commentators concluded that the American experiment had ended in triumph, that the United States had become all the world. But the American experiment had not in fact ended. A nation founded on revolution and universal rights will forever struggle against chaos and the forces of particularism. A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.”—Jill Lepore, “A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019 Issue

Quote of the Day (John Adams, Warning Against Fanaticism and Other Dangers to the Republic)

“Our hopes however of Sudden tranquility ought not to be too Sanguine. Fanaticism and Superstition will Still be Selfish, Subtle, intriguing, and at times furious. Despotism will Still Struggle for domination; Monarchy will Still Study to rival nobility in popularity; Aristocracy will continue to envy all above it, and despize and oppress all below it; Democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavour to pull down all; and when by chance it happens to get the Upper hand for a Short time, it will be revengefull bloody and cruel. These and other Elements of Fanaticism and Anarchy will yet for a long time continue a Fermentation, which will excite alarms and require Vigilance.”—John Adams (1735-1826), signer of the Declaration of Independence and second President of the United States, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814

On that cautionary note, Happy Fourth of July, Faithful Reader!

Quote of the Day (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, on Reason and Freedom as God-Given Gifts)

“O sublime generosity of God the Father! O highest and most wonderful felicity of man! To him it was granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills….When man came into life, the Father endowed him with all kinds of seeds and with the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow and bear fruit in him. If these seeds are vegetative, he will be like a plant; if they are sensitive, he will become like the beasts; if they are rational he will become like a heavenly creature; if intellectual, he will be an angel and a son of God. And if, content with the lot of no created being, his spirit, made one with God in the solitary darkness of the Father, which is above all things, will surpass all things.

“Who then will not wonder at this chameleon of ours, or who could not wonder more greatly at anything else?”— Italian Renaissance philosopher and scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), “The Dignity of Man,” 1486, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary M. McLaughlin (1953)

Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address of 1837 kicked off American intellectual thought, so “The Dignity of Man” (or, as I heard it more formally referred to in college, the “Oration on the Dignity of Man”) has generally been considered the manifesto of the Renaissance.

In Dorothy Dunnett’s seventh novel in her “House of Niccolo” historical fiction series, Caprice and Rondo, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is a correspondent of Callimachus, an Italian humanist poet exiled to Poland. But Pico could easily be a major character in his own right. 

He was gifted beyond the dreams of ordinary men, not just with the riches one might expect of the heir to the principality of Mirandola but also (as suggested by the accompanying portrait in from the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence) with good looks, a phenomenal memory, effortless command of Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, and a charisma that drew women and men. Altogether, he was a dazzler in the Platonic Academy of Florence founded by Cosimo de' Medici. Aspiring to soar with the angels, he could only be brought down by his own impetuosity and the jealousy of others.

By his early 20s, Pico had decided not just to issue his equivalent of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologica, boiled down to 900 theses, but to defend it against all comers. Like Aquinas’ systematic body of knowledge, it was never finished. And like the Summa, it attracted early on the baleful eye of censors who regarded some of its propositions as heretical.

Though he argued for human freedom, dignity and autonomy, Pico’s thought had none of the secular overtones associated with today’s brand of humanism. Reason and the intellect, because they are God-given, he believed, not only separate us from the beasts but, when fully and properly used, lift men to the level of angels. 

By seeking to reconcile traditional church teachings with newly available texts on the Kabbala and ancient Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle, Pico provoked clerical enemies in the Inquisition (as well as personal enemies outside it, when he tried to run away with the wife of a cousin of his protector, Lorenzo de’Medici). The last half-dozen years of his life were marked by papal censure (Innocent VIII), Pico’s flight from Rome, imprisonment in France, release, and a late reconciliation with new pontiff Alexander VI.

Pico’s death at age 31 left far more open questions than just the manner of his passing. (The rumor that he and friend Angelo Poliziano were poisoned at the instigation of Lorenzo’s son, Piero de’ Medici, was confirmed only a decade ago by scientists using biomolecular technology, scanning equipment, and DNA analysis.) 

Nobody knows how much more he would have contributed to world thought if he had had the chance. Even though he wrote comparatively little in his truncated life, that residue remains enduring and powerful, as noted by conservative political and cultural theorist Russell Kirk:

“If Things are to be thrust out of the saddle once more, and Man mounted (in Pico’s phrase) ‘to join battle as to the sound of a trumpet of war’ on behalf of man’s higher nature, then some of us must go barefoot through the world, like Pico, preaching the vegetative and sensual errors of our time.”

(This blog post was inspired by two teachers highly different in temperament but similar in their commitment to reason: Prof. Eugene Rice, who, over several decades in his Modern European History survey course at my college, recounted to me and thousands of other students the personality and importance of Pico; and Sister Margaret Bradley, a Knick-loving Sister of Charity in my high school who told me not only that there was such a thing as a “Christian humanist,” but also that it was a title to be worn with pride.)

Quote of the Day (Irving Howe, on Defending Freedom as the ‘Sacred Task of the Intellectual’)

“The obligation to defend and extend freedom in its simplest and most fundamental aspects is the sacred task of the intellectual, the one task he must not compromise even when his posture seems intractable, or unreasonable, or hopeless, or even when it means standing alone against shibboleths like Revolution and The Third World.”— Jewish-American literary and social critic Irving Howe (1920-1993), “What’s the Trouble?” in A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays of Irving Howe, edited by Nina Howe with the assistance of Nicholas Howe Bukowski (2014)