Peter Wehner > Quotes

“The great scholar and senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said decades ago, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Try to interact with people who have a different political perspective than you do—and when you do, listen to understand, not just to refute.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“No president has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness. And through his words, the president is not only spreading ignorance; he is glorifying it.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men,”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“while human beings are rational and capable of moral excellence, they are also driven by appetites and detestations, so laws are important checks on both.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“But something happened along the way. People who in the past viewed news outlets as biased now view them as fraudulent.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Moderation does not mean that truth is always found equidistant between two extreme positions, nor does it mean that bold steps aren’t necessary to advance moral ends, nor that political actors eschew strong and principled convictions.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“fear, as a basis for Christian politics, is our enemy, not our friend. It is not our weapon; rather it controls us and eventually can consume us.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“have in mind will require Christians to make a compelling case for social order and moral excellence, but done with a generosity of spirit, all the while offering a healing touch, especially to those who are suffering and living in the shadows of society.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Popular sovereignty was a valid democratic practice, but not if it is contradicted by fundamental law. Basic human rights could not be voted up or down by a majority.”27”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“The way to think about moderation is as a disposition, not as an ideology. Its antithesis is not conviction but intemperance.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“But Jerry Falwell Sr. gave way to Jerry Falwell Jr., Billy Graham gave way to Franklin Graham, and things are now worse, not better. The Trump era has utterly discredited significant parts of the American evangelical movement.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“we should be spurred to put a higher premium on politicians who demonstrate competence and creativity, experience and artistry, wisdom and sound judgment.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“We believe we have worth because we are created in God’s image, he said. But even more basic is the declaration that we have value simply because God values us.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“There is no authoritative theological construct in place to check, channel, and refine raw partisanship cloaked in Christian garb.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Every generation has to decide whether it will continue America’s noble experiment in ordered liberty or allow the foundation our ancestors built to fracture. Today we are witnessing cracks forming and spreading, due in part to a president who delights in demonization, who himself embodies an ethic of cruelty and selfishness, and whose corruptions are borderless.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“When social conservatives and progressives, in their different ways, argue that government cannot avoid legislating morality, it is Locke they are arguing with.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“The modus operandi of Trump World is this: If facts exist that are incriminating to Mr. Trump, dismiss the facts. Label them fake news. And go on lying.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“America’s most visible public figure possesses a streak of cruelty that he won’t control, which he promiscuously and proudly displays, and which is amplified by social media.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Essentially what is happening is that those who are comfortable with demographic and cultural changes are identifying as Democrats while those who are uncomfortable with those changes are identifying as Republicans—and never the twain shall meet.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Without truth, a free society cannot operate. Which is why Trump’s rhetoric ought to matter to all of us,”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Each party is caught in a time warp, in important ways disconnected from the problems of ordinary Americans and so far unable to do much about them.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Contempt for our political practices, even if it is unintentional, denigrates the historical efforts that went into their formation.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.”61”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Lincoln insisted on interpreting the Constitution, which is primarily a procedural charter, through the lens of the Declaration of Independence, which put forward a philosophical and moral proposition”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Responsible citizenship means rewarding leaders who demonstrate integrity and appeal to our better angels rather than our worst impulses, and caring enough about truth to reject propaganda and lies from politicians, pundits, and presidents who spew them.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Without truth, a free society cannot operate. Which is why Trump’s rhetoric ought to matter to all of us, and why it is our civic duty to call out his lies in every way we can.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“To be a citizen means to be a participant in civic life, not just a spectator. It means taking the time to be informed and voting in local, state, and national elections. It means seeing the problems America faces for what they are, apportioning in a fair-minded way responsibility for what has gone wrong, and taking ownership of our nation.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

“Today there are differences in epistemology, the theory of knowledge that allows us to distinguish facts and justified belief from opinion. As a result, people are increasingly living in their own realities, creating their own facts, writing their own scripts. Facts are to be molded like Play-Doh.”
― Peter Wehner, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump