Paul Kengor Quotes

Which founders have these presidents cited - and why? What did, say, President [Ronald] Reagan's view of George Washington, or President [Bill] Clinton's view of Thomas Jefferson, tell us about their view of America and where they intended to lead the country?In many cases, it told us a lot about the president.

[John] McCain references favorite presidents like Teddy Roosevelt. Hillary cited Eleanor Roosevelt.

In part, it's almost surely a failure of modern education, whether K through 12 or higher education, or really both. Barack Obama went to Ivy League institutions like Columbia, which are reputed to be among America's top colleges. And yet, this very recent product of those American institutions is not publicly articulating an appreciation of the American founding or the founders and their vision for America.

[ Alexis de] Tocqueville said it in 1835, and it's as true today as it was then: 'Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is more needed in democratic societies than in any other.'

President Bush, yes, spent money like a drunken sailor, and left the nation with a record $400-billion deficit. President Obama, however, is spending far more money than Bush, with a record $1.8 trillion deficit projected for his first year.

As has been reported, and is unmistakably evident to all but the most naïve, federal employees have been ordered to exploit this crisis, to make the government shutdown as uncomfortable as they can. The White House is actively soliciting complaints from the general public on 'how the government shutdown has affected you.' These testimonies are tools sought for the propaganda kit; the better to agitate with.

Learning is a good thing, but unless it's tempered by faith and a love of freedom, it can be very dangerous indeed.

Reagan thought that school prayer was important because it was crucial to begin each day reminding students that their inalienable rights came to them from their Creator and not from government bureaucrats.

It is interesting that liberals don't mind a strong faith at all. When it's their guy with a strong faith - whether it's Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson or Harry Truman - that's just great. FDR inscribing Bibles and sending them to the troops. God bless him! But when a Republican president cites Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher, as George W. Bush did on a famous occasion, then, well, the liberals cry out that [Tomás de] Torquemada is on the loose and warn gravely of the coming Inquisition.

Reagan loved and respected his father, Jack Reagan. But if there was a father figure to Reagan in the religious sense, it was Ben Cleaver. What Reagan's father didn't provide spiritually, from a fatherly point of view, Cleaver did.

Reagan saw the Soviet Union as evil, all right, and not only because it was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people but also because it was atheistic. [Vladimir] Lenin said that religious faith and communism were incompatible.

[Gerald] Ford and [Jimmy] Carter, in fact, were huge disappointments to me. Think about this: They were the presidents around the time of America's historic bicentennial, and yet rarely quoted the founders.

[Barack] Obama isn't pointing to anyone, and certainly doesn't like it when others note (correctly) that his influences were the likes of Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan and modern founder of community organizing, or Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist and agitator from Chicago who mentored Obama in Hawaii in the latter 1970s, and who Obama warmly acknowledges in his memoirs.

Many of these failures can be laid at the feet of the awful state of American higher education, and especially the way in which our secular universities have divorced their instruction from timeless truths like faith and freedom. Many of the professors at these places plainly don't respect the founders and, in particular, the religious foundation of the founders.

The American founding is not just about a group of people, a group of men. It is about an ideal: Both a vision and understanding of the very essence of democracy, constitutional government, a representative republic, and the remarkably powerful concept of being endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.

Throughout American history our presidents have invoked our nation's founding fathers. This is particularly true of recent presidents.

In [Ronald] Reagan's view, the American Founders had anchored their experiment in Judeo-Christian beliefs; the Bolsheviks deliberately established an antithetical model. Those founders of communism divorced their "faith" from God.

You would hope that the supposed best of American educational institutions would teach its students about America as an institution.

If our presidents, or potential presidents, don't know this or don't articulate [an America ideal], that's a blown opportunity. The president can teach as well as lead.

Issues are important, yes, but issues come and go. America as an ideal is timeless.

It is quite sad, to me, that that ideal, that vision and understanding [of American founding ], doesn't seem to be a part of the current political season.

Speaking of [Ronald] Reagan on the faith of the founders, he was particularly fond of George Washington, who he cited nearly 200 times, and almost twice as much as all the presidents since [John F.]Kennedy combined.

[Ronald Reagan] called the image of [George] Washington praying on his knees in Valley Forge "the most sublime image in American history."

I was a child or didn't live through those presidents prior to [Ronald] Reagan, and thus didn't realize how little attention they had paid to the founders.

I was disappointed in how [Bill] Clinton, like [Jimmy] Carter, used the founders to argue for huge expansions in federal power, clearly beyond what the founders could have ever conceived.