Yuval Levin > Quotes

“Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones.”
― Yuval Levin

“To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed.”
― Yuval Levin

“Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”44 Rather, he argued that while politics does answer to reason, human reason does not interact directly with the world but is always mediated by our imagination, which helps us to give order and shape to the data we derive from our senses. One way or another, reason applies through the sentiments and passions, so it is crucial to tend to what he calls our “moral imagination” because left untended, it will direct our reason toward violence and disorder.45 The dark side of our sentiments is mitigated not by pure reason, but by more beneficent sentiments. We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country. And part of the statesman’s difficult charge is keeping this balance together, acting rationally on this understanding of the limits of reason. “The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman,” Burke asserts.46 It is for Burke another reason why politics can never be reduced to a simple application of logical axioms. As Burke’s contemporary William Hazlitt put it: “[Burke] knew that man had affections and passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and cold. . . . He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all,” Burke writes.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“we must all accept the responsibilities that come with the positions we hold, and we must ensure that obligations and restraints actually protect and empower us. We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well.”
― Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

“It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The poor are more isolated—economically, culturally, and socially—than they used to be in America.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“by exposing something I have seen to someone with eyes to see it differently from me, might spark some insights that would not have otherwise occurred to either of us. And”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars—whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“At the core of this unity was not just a common set of ideals, but also the notion of commonality itself as an ideal.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“progress of the ethic of diffusion and liberalization has meant growing estrangement from precisely these prerequisites for human flourishing, especially among the least advantaged Americans.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“problem we face is not the risk of cataclysm, but the acceptance of widespread despair and disorder in the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“There are only perches within society, and we can elevate our sights by considering how things might look from those of others.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Over time, as liberalization and deconsolidation became the dominant ethic of American life, the consensus broke down and cultural liberalism came to be at least implicitly the ideology of the American elite.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“This was not the intent of the reformers who advanced such changes in both parties. They sought to democratize the parties’ internal procedures and so to give the public more of a voice in the earliest stages of the political process. But the result has been a less democratic American party system, because it is one that empowers only the most active fringes of both parties—and especially the small percentage of voters who participate in party primaries. Those tend to be the voters least interested in bargaining and compromise and least inclined to see the point of the accommodationist structure of our system’s core institutions. Primaries have actually empowered elites—elites who are amateur activists with a lot of time for politics, not those who are party professionals but elites nonetheless, and not the broad public. By making office seekers most attentive to those voters rather than to the marginal voters essential for broader coalition building and who had been the focus of party professionals, the modern primary system has drawn into politics a type of politician who is not well suited to the work of the institutions, and so to the office to which he or she is seeking election.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Conservatives often begin from gratitude because we start from modest expectations of human affairs—we know that people are imperfect, and fallen, and weak; that human knowledge and power are not all they’re cracked up to be; and we’re enormously impressed by the institutions that have managed to make something great of this imperfect raw material. So we want to build on them because we don’t imagine we could do better starting from scratch.
Liberals often begin from outrage because they have much higher expectations—maybe even utopian expectations—about the perfectibility of human things and the potential of human knowledge and power. They’re often willing to ignore tradition and to push aside institutions that channel generations of wisdom because they think we can do better on our own.”
― Yuval Levin

“prescriptions of these writers are nonetheless fundamentally backward looking, because their standard is a particular point in time.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“mobility agenda, whether advanced by the Right or the Left, must start with growth and build to the lifting of burdens, the clearing of paths, and the revitalization of American education.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“there are never simple or universal formulas for revitalizing a complex society.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Our keen sense of our own unease does not mean that we are stuck, therefore. It means that we are already moving. But where, and how?”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“What is remarkable in Burke’s first performance,” wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, “is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself.”4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages,” Burke writes in the Reflections.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“countless Americans of all parties and no party are practical, experienced experts in putting family, faith, and community first and helping one another in hard times. A”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“But the American system does not assume that the instinct for bargaining will come naturally to citizens or even to their representatives. Rather, it forces people with differing interests and views to engage with one another by making some degree of bargaining unavoidable”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Our problems are the troubles of a fractured republic, and the solutions we pursue will need to call upon the strengths of a decentralized, diffuse, diverse, dynamic nation. The”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“In Federalist 62, Madison lays out, in its fullest form, his case for the importance of stability in holding together a republican regime. Too much unpredictability in government threatens the country’s security because it “forfeits the respect and confidence of other nations, and all the advantages connected with national character.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Rising generations of Americans will soon need to look around and build their own understanding of the present, and sense of the future,”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism