The politics of identity make the present a prisoner of the past, with individuals viewed chiefly through the lens of race or other arbitrary characteristics. Douglass argued for identifying with America—with the nation founded on “human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.”
Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person.
Margaret Thatcher is one of the great prime ministers in British history, and one of the longest serving, at least in continuous times. 
America is still a young country. But what a 400 years it has been in the economic history of humankind! 
The defining feature of Ronald Reagan was his moral courage. 
Europeans today prefer leisure to performance, security to risk-taking, paternalism to free markets, collectivism and group entitlements to individualism. 
I think it is no exaggeration to say that one of the most clear-sighted, deeply learned, and steadily courageous of all of the servants of human freedom in our age is the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus. 
It is one of the wonders of the political world that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 
Heroes have become invisible. Their virtues have become unexplainable in the language we now use to explain human actions 
From the heroes of the past we learn, and what they teach, by the example of their lives and words, has the special quality of truth by personal example. Send this to friend
