Ben Sasse > Quotes

“...there is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“I believe our entire nation is in the midst of a collective coming-of-age crisis without parallel in our history. We are living in an America of perpetual adolescence. Our kids simply don't know what an adult is anymore - or how to become one. Many don't even see a reason to try. Perhaps more problematic, the older generations have forgotten that we need to plan to teach them. It's our fault more than it is theirs.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“There is a deep and corrosive tribal impulse to act as if "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." But sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a jackass.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions and awaking the curiosity in the soul of each citizen. National greatness will not be recovered via a mindless expansion of bureaucratized schooling. Seventy years ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote, 'Sure, we demand another grant of money, we postpone the school leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. We demand that teachers further slave conscientiously in and out of school hours. But to what end? I believe,' Sayers lamented, 'all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have no definable goal for each child to become a fully formed adult. We have lost the tools of learning, sacrificing them to the piecemeal, subject matter approach of bureaucratized schooling that finally compromises to produce passive rather than active emerging adults. But our kids are not commodities, they are plants. They require a protected environment, and care, and feeding, but most basically, an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight. What we need is the equipping of each child with those lost tools.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“It is not only the content of a book that changes you but the shared community with those who have read it, discussed it, argued about it.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Our goal is for our kids to be intentional about everything they do --- to reject passivity and mindless consumption and to embrace an ethos of action, of productivity, of meaningful work, of genuinely lifelong learning.”
― Ben Sasse

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. —Neil Postman To”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”3”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“America’s Founders understood literacy as a prerequisite for freedom and our form of self-government. Once we know how to read, what we read matters. So let’s build some reading lists of books you plan to wrestle with and be shaped by for the rest of your lifetime. Then,”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“If we really want to be happy, we must plant roots and tend them. that means, in large part, thinking carefully about how to get the best out of the technology that liberates us from inconveniences - without letting our devices cut us off from the richest parts of life.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“In the midst of extraordinary prosperity, we’re also living through a crisis. Our communities are collapsing, and people are feeling more isolated, adrift, and purposeless than ever before.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“A hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work rather than freedom from your work, even when work might hurt.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“I'm a conservative but not because I care very much about the marginal tax rates of the richest Americans, rather I'm a market-oriented localist because I believe in cultural pluralism and I believe in the First Amendment, in voluntarism over compulsion whenever possible, and in as much de-centralized decision-making as is conceivably feasible.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Lacking meaningful attachments, people are finding a perverse bond in at least sharing a common enemy.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. Contrary”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“The fact that college campuses, once the cornerstone of free expression and open debate, are now among the most intellectually intolerant spaces in America should concern us deeply.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Many of our television hosts are modern-day carnival barkers. We get dopamine, adrenalin, and oxytocin all at once. It's an adult video game. But instead of expertly separating us from our wallets, they're separating us from things much more valuable. Our time, our sense of perspective, and our judgment. And they are separating us from each other.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“Right now partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War. Why? It’s certainly not because our political discussions are more important. It’s because the local, human relationships that anchored political talk have shriveled up. Alienated from each other, and uprooted from places we can call home, we’re reduced to shrieking.3”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“As Putnam demonstrates, poorer, less-educated parents tend to believe that their primary task is getting their children to obey, as opposed to better-educated parents, who emphasize helping their children understand why they ought to obey a given rule. Reading, reasoning, and problem-solving with their parents help children develop the higher-order skills that make them better equipped to face the challenges of a fluid, complex world.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“We have a crisis in this nation, and it has nothing to do with regulatory reform or marginal tax rates. This book is not going to be about politics. (Sorry to disappoint.) It’s about something deeper and more meaningful. Something a little harder to quantify but a lot more personal. Despite the astonishing medical advances and technological leaps of recent years, average life span is in decline in America for the third year in a row. This is the first time our nation has had even a two-year drop in life expectancy since 1962—when the cause was an influenza epidemic. Normally, declines in life expectancy are due to something big like that—a war, or the return of a dormant disease. But what’s the “big thing” going on in America now? What’s killing all these people? The 2016 data point to three culprits: Alzheimer’s, suicides, and unintentional injuries—a category that includes drug and alcohol–related deaths. Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. That’s 11,000 more than the previous year, and it’s more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. It’s almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year high—and the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.1 We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Could we perhaps be rearing a generation that might not be tough enough to be good Americans? For a good American needs to be tough.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Learning can't be force fed. It needs to come in response to genuinely asked questions by genuinely curious people. Experts can't educate your kids until your kids have the desire to be educated.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Yet despite the complexity of contemporary society, there are still some simple formulas we can use to distill the path to social and economic flourishing. One of these, labeled the “Success Sequence,” and credited to Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the left-of-center Brookings Institute, proposes a three-step rule book for modern American life:

1. Finish high school.
2. Get a job. (Any job. Because working leads to more working, which leads to better jobs.)
3. Get married before having children.

When people follow this pattern—and crucially, in this order—life generally turns out pretty well.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“When one half of the nation demonizes the other half, tendrils of resentment reach out and strangle whatever charitable impulses remain in us.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Let’s hope that, over time, we’ll develop a bias, when we have an extra free hour, toward shoveling snow from the elderly neighbor lady’s sidewalk over streaming another Netflix sitcom.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Living only in the present isn’t freedom. Living only in the present isn’t even human if you think about it. Humans, unlike any other animal on the planet, remember the past. We understand our nature. And we try to build on both of them. We are an aspirational species; we look to the future.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Death is the hardest question, and in an age that gives short shrift to the transmission of wisdom from old to young, it is not surprising that death is the single most obvious fact of life from which we constantly insulate our kids. We have, to our detriment, created a cult of denial about our own mortality. Life needs to be lived and prioritized with the understanding that it is limited. An”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“As The Atlantic’s Julie Beck has written, we’re building “pillow forts” of comfortable information around us and making it more and more difficult for anything we don’t want to hear to penetrate.5”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal