Christopher Caldwell > Quotes

“Civil rights thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it. What we call political correctness is the natural outcome of civil rights, which makes fighting bias a condition for the legitimacy of the state. Once bias is held to be part of the “unconscious,” of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.”
― Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

“Only with the entrenchment of political correctness did it become clear what Americans had done in 1964: They had inadvertently voted themselves a second constitution without explicitly repealing the one they had. Each constitution contained guarantees”
― Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

“Typical was the French polymath Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1883: Those liberals who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror.…But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress.”
― Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

“The Baby Boomers were the last generation of Americans who would be taught in school that their country had “never lost a war.” In most things, in fact, they would have more in common with their parents than with their children. They were educated for a pre-computer world. They listened to a combination of folk-rock and vaguely British-inflected rock, which, for their children, would be eclipsed by various kinds of rap. All Boomers were born into a pre–civil rights America, and they were the last generation to grow up wholly outside the shadow of what would be known as political correctness.”
― Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

“There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing. For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.”
― Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

“If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that the bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour.”
― Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

“One of history's secrets is that the revolutionaries' appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew.”
― Christopher Caldwell

“At some point, Democrats became the party of small-town people who think they’re too big for their small towns…For these people, liberalism is not a belief at all. No, it’s something more important: a badge of certain social aspirations. That is why the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”
― Christopher Caldwell

“arrived veiled, as compared to 639 the previous fall. Chirac ordered that the hundredth anniversary”
― Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

“If a cynic is one who, as Oscar Wilde said, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, the Boomers were the opposite. They knew the value of everything and the price of nothing. But that could not last.”
― Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

“Bob Dylan's Christianity has been allusive, idiosyncratic, and never the sort to place him on anyone's side in any Kulturkampf.”
― Christopher Caldwell

“Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized.”
― Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

“Only with the entrenchment of political correctness did it become clear what Americans had done in 1964: They had inadvertently voted themselves a second constitution without explicitly repealing the one they had. Each constitution contained guarantees of rights that could be invoked against the other—but in any conflict it was the new, unofficial constitution, nurtured by elites in all walks of life, that tended to prevail.”
― Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties