Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it. 
From this history we learn that it is not the nation-state, but the kinds of nation-states that matter. From the birth of political philosophy in ancient Athens, it has been understood in the West that the difference between good and bad regimes, just as between lives lived well and lives lived badly, is all-important.
I fear America may be leaving the world of normal politics and entering the dangerous world of regime politics—a politics in which our political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850s, between two contrary visions of the country.
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. 