Yuval Levin Quotes & Sayings

The government of human beings, he argued, is a matter not of applying cold rules and principles, but of tending to warm sentiments and attachments to produce the strongest and best unified community possible. — Yuval Levin

The objects and the flavor of our national nostalgia are not random. They draw on the memories of a particular group of Americans who have exercised an extraordinary power over the nation's self-image. — Yuval Levin

We are uneasy. And unease leads men and women to seek change, to innovate, to build on the best that they have and to uproot the worst. — Yuval Levin

Over and over, the effects of America's diffusion, and then of its efforts to adjust to that diffusion, seemed to reach the wealthy and advantaged as rewards, but hit the poor and disadvantaged as punishments. — Yuval Levin

we should consider how they came to be, how and why America has changed, and what this might mean for what America is becoming. — Yuval Levin

The pervasiveness and intensity of our nostalgia make it hard to achieve the kind of analytic distance that would allow us to address these questions seriously. That — Yuval Levin

How can we make the most of the opportunities afforded by the dynamism and the freedom set loose by America's postwar diffusion while mitigating its costs and burdens, especially for the most vulnerable among us? In — Yuval Levin

countless Americans of all parties and no party are practical, experienced experts in putting family, faith, and community first and helping one another in hard times. A — Yuval Levin

It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms. — Yuval Levin

The Constitution rejects the populist view that the people have the knowledge required to rule, and it rejects the technocratic view that a body of experts has the knowledge required to rule. Instead, it embodies the view that no one has the requisite knowledge, and that government should therefore be designed to force different groups in society to bargain and cooperate. Restraining — Yuval Levin

The American idea of progress is the tradition that we're defending. It is made possible precisely by sustaining our deep ties to the ideals of liberty, and equality, and human dignity expressed in our founding and our institutions. The great moral advances in our history have involved the vindication of those principles - have involved America becoming more like itself. — Yuval Levin

The experience of seeing differences of dogma made moot in practice by the bonds of family affection and neighborly respect was formative for him. It seemed to leave him with a lasting sense that life was more complicated in practice than in theory - and that this was a good thing. — Yuval Levin

Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones. — Yuval Levin

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy," Burke wrote in the Reflections, "which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors. . . . In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth."58 — Yuval Levin

We should look for ways to thrive that are suited to the nation we have become and are still becoming. — Yuval Levin

Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. — Yuval Levin

America needs to be careful not to let aging baby boomers define its outlook. We cannot afford to farm out our vision of the future to a retiring generation. We can already see some indications of where that will lead: our political, cultural, and economic conversations today overflow with the language of decay and corrosion, as if our body politic is itself an aging boomer looking back upon his glory days. — Yuval Levin

efforts and character of institutions like these can grow into a way of life when the people involved in them put them at the center of their cultural existence and identity and, as it were, fall into orbit around their rich moral core. — Yuval Levin

The poor are more isolated - economically, culturally, and socially - than they used to be in America. — Yuval Levin

Institutions that channel social knowledge from below and address human needs at a personal level are more likely to adapt to problems and circumstances and to find solutions. That — Yuval Levin

The more hopeful mode suggests that emphasizing the needs and well-being of one's near-at-hand community first and foremost can be, for social conservatives, not an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so. — Yuval Levin

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle," Burke writes. — Yuval Levin

Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T — Yuval Levin

Low-income Americans' potential for mobility is often impaired by family breakdown, cultural dysfunction, and the polarization of norms — Yuval Levin

progress of the ethic of diffusion and liberalization has meant growing estrangement from precisely these prerequisites for human flourishing, especially among the least advantaged Americans. — Yuval Levin

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all, Burke writes. — Yuval Levin

What is remarkable in Burke's first performance," wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, "is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself."4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life. — Yuval Levin

In our time, no less than any other, traditionalists should live out their faiths and their ways in the world, confident that their instruction and example will make that world better and that people will be drawn to the spark. — Yuval Levin

it will have to overcome a social vision that is by now deeply rooted and powerfully dominant among liberals: the idea that the only genuine liberty is individual liberty, and that the only legitimate authority is the authority of the national government. The — Yuval Levin

first, that whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and in the process alienating the public. — Yuval Levin

The concerns of vulnerable workers and the poor, and their particular susceptibility to the ill effects of the diffusing forces operating in our society and economy, therefore need to be front and center in our economic thinking. This — Yuval Levin

Our keen sense of our own unease does not mean that we are stuck, therefore. It means that we are already moving. But where, and how? — Yuval Levin

Burke argued that political parties were not, as many people insisted, factions each contending for its own particular advantage, but rather were bodies of men each united by a vision of the common good of the whole nation. Partisanship, he insisted, was not only unavoidable but also beneficial, as it helped to organize politics into camps defined by different priorities about what was best for the country. — Yuval Levin

The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars - whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees. — Yuval Levin

moral anarchy has actually become something like the explicit goal of some of our most influential institutions. — Yuval Levin

Just as solidarity had an underside of repression, so liberalization had an underside of chaos; — Yuval Levin

by exposing something I have seen to someone with eyes to see it differently from me, might spark some insights that would not have otherwise occurred to either of us. And — Yuval Levin

social Left is a minority, too, and it is a minority aspiring to dominate our institutions at a time when those institutions are particularly weak and diffuse. — Yuval Levin

There are only perches within society, and we can elevate our sights by considering how things might look from those of others. — Yuval Levin

In our time, in particular, many people are not only estranged from some of them but are denied the chance to encounter them. — Yuval Levin

A culture of more ordered individualism was more valuable to people building from a foundation of stability than to those working to rise from entrenched disadvantage, or to overcome the burdens of broken homes and communities. — Yuval Levin

[T]heories inevitably can't be as complex as life itself. — Yuval Levin