Michael Medved > Quotes

“Both adults have always worked," observes Cox, writing with business journalist Richard Alm. "Running a household entails a daunting list of chores: cooking, gardening, child care, shopping, washing and ironing, financial management, ferrying family members to ballet lessons and soccer practice... the idea that people at home don't work isn't just insulting to women, who do most of the housework. It also misses how specialization contributes to higher and higher living standards. At one time, both adults worked exclusively at home. The man constructed buildings, tilled the land, raised livestock. The woman prepared meals, preserved food, looked after the children. Living standards rarely raised above the subsistence level." But as men went to work outside the home- "gaining specialized skills and earning income that allowed the family to buy what it didn't have the time, energy or ability to make at home"-- living standards rose.
------ Michael Medved quoting Cox and Alm, "10 Big Lies about America" page 224”
― Michael Medved, The 10 Big Lies about America

“The idea that every government official counts as all-wise and incorruptible makes no more sense than the assumption that each corporate honcho displays flawless judgment and stainless ethics.”
― Michael Medved, The 10 Big Lies about America

“Saudi Arabia outlawed slave owning only in 1962. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania finally moved toward abolition in 1981, but the practice continued unabated, even after a 2003 law that made slave ownership punishable with jail or a fine. As recently as December 2004, the BBC cited Boubakar Messaoud of Mauritania’s SOS Slaves organization: ‘A Mauritanian slave, whose parents and grandparents before him were slaves, doesn’t need chains. He has been brought up as a domesticated animal.”
― Michael Medved, The 10 Big Lies about America

“Surprisingly, the most passionate voice calling for an immediate end to the “infernal traffic” in captive Africans came from the Virginia delegation. George Mason, a wealthy plantation owner and brilliant lawyer who personally owned more than two hundred slaves, had come to see slavery as “a slow Poison…daily contaminating the Minds and Morals of our People.” He argued that holding slaves would “bring the judgment of heaven on a Country…As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”
― Michael Medved, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic

“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.” —Abraham Lincoln, first Inaugural Address, March 4,”
― Michael Medved, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic

“What’s the matter with us anyhow? If America ever loses confidence in herself, she will retain the confidence of no one, and she will lose her chance to be free, because the fearful are never free. —ADLAI STEVENSON, 1954”
― Michael Medved, The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation

“Since the days of the Pilgrims, leaders of the new society that arose in the New World have embraced the core concept of a divinely determined destiny. For nearly four hundred years, Americans nourished the notion that God maintained an intimate, protective connection to their singular nation. Only recently, with the emphasis on guilt over gratitude in our teaching of history, has the public grown uncomfortable with the idea that fate favors American endeavors. Today, the merest suggestion that the Almighty plays favorites among the nations of the world strikes contemporary sensibilities as offensive, outrageous, or at least controversial.”
― Michael Medved, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic

“All men who feel any power of joy in battle know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.”
― Michael Medved, God's Hand on America: Divine Providence in the Modern Era

“… the English colonies in North America accounted for only a tiny fraction of the hideous traffic in human beings. David Brion Davis, in his magisterial 2006 history Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, concludes that colonial North America ‘surprisingly received only 5 to 6 percent of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic.’ Hugh Thomas in The Slave Trade calculates the percentage as slightly lower, at 4.4 percent.”
― Michael Medved, The 10 Big Lies about America

“No minor-party candidate has ever won the presidency or, for that matter, even come close. For the most part, these ego-driven ‘independent’ adventures in electoral narcissism push the political process further away from their supporters’ professed goals, rather than advancing the insurgent group’s agenda or ideas.”
― Michael Medved, The 10 Big Lies about America

“Harvard historian Crane Brinton (The Anatomy of Revolution) pointed out that revolutionary sentiments generally develop in periods of long-term economic progress, not abject deprivation. When business produces a sharp increase in living standards, the ‘revolution of rising expectations’ leaves workers and farmers impatient for more rapid advancement.”
― Michael Medved, The 10 Big Lies about America