James Poulos > Quotes

“Although obviously we are beholding a person when we behold ourselves, our instincts rebel at the notion that we’re reckoning with a person when we reckon with our selves.”
― James Poulos, The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us from Ourselves

“It’s almost as if we dreamed up this thing called the self in order to focus our chaotic energies on a single dysfunctional relationship.”
― James Poulos, The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us from Ourselves

“Those of us who imagine we have a big caste of permanently wealthy Americans are just much more wrong than we think. Even when generations manage to hold onto wealth, the gymnastics they must perform are risky and laborious, the failure rate is high, and the casualties can be enormous. (Exhibit A: the Hilton family.)”
― James Poulos, The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us from Ourselves

“our “anxious and eager” love of wealth, amid an ever-churning and unstable economy, would lead us to “become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures” that we would give up on the future.21 Rather than striving for our own advancement or that of our descendants, we would “tamely” go where fate seemed to push us instead of making the “sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.” Tocqueville wasn’t just speaking of our personal fates, but of the fate of America as a nation.”
― James Poulos, The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us from Ourselves

“When I am lost and fearful, there is an atm in the sky.”
― James Poulos, brooklynwind