“The most interesting question of history is always, What were these people thinking?”
Vorkosigan Saga, (2012)
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Lois McMaster Bujold 383
Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA 1949Related quotes
The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: The liberals were wide-ranging in their interests, ready to question the orthodoxies of the time, and looking for new horizons. It is always difficult to find people like that, but it is even more difficult today.
The liberals of the nineteen-thirties were diverse, but they had a common vision. They accepted democracy, the free market, and capitalism. However, they thought that unless the market was not corrected or ameliorated, there would be child labor, neglect of the elderly, dangerous and harmful consumer goods, monopolies squeezing people out of business and forcing down wages — in short, there would be the horror of Great Britain's Industrial Revolution before the British began passing social legislation.

of institutional racism
In [Ray, Elaine, Cory Booker encourages students to use their moral imaginations to work for good, https://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2016/02/24/cory-booker-encourages-students-to-use-their-moral-imaginations-to-work-for-good/, Stanford University, 21 August 2018, February 24, 2016], as quoted in [Ross, Janell, Six noteworthy things about Cory Booker, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/25/six-noteworthy-things-about-cory-booker/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8842f22736b9, 21 August 2018, The Washington Post, July 25, 2016]
2016

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (2 April 1798); published in The Writings of James Madison (1906) edited by Gaillard Hunt, Vol. 6, pp. 312-14
1790s
Context: The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature. But the Doctrines lately advanced strike at the root of all these provisions, and will deposit the peace of the Country in that Department which the Constitution distrusts as most ready without cause to renounce it. For if the opinion of the President not the facts & proofs themselves are to sway the judgment of Congress, in declaring war, and if the President in the recess of Congress create a foreign mission, appoint the minister, & negociate a War Treaty, without the possibility of a check even from the Senate, untill the measures present alternatives overruling the freedom of its judgment; if again a Treaty when made obliges the Legislature to declare war contrary to its judgment, and in pursuance of the same doctrine, a law declaring war, imposes a like moral obligation, to grant the requisite supplies until it be formally repealed with the consent of the President & Senate, it is evident that the people are cheated out of the best ingredients in their Government, the safeguards of peace which is the greatest of their blessings.

The Wall Street Journal (August 14, 2010) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.html.