Latest Paul Kengor Quotes from Interviews

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• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Strong, Jesus, Interesting

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• "Freedom" is probably the word he said more than any other. He used the word freedom constantly. I think for some his frequent calls for freedom became a cliché because he did it so often. They didn't get it, but Reagan certainly did. He thought deeply about the relationship between God and human freedom and the nonrelationship between atheistic communism and that freedom.

  Paul Kengor

  Thinking, Communism, Used

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Prayer, School, Rights

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• When Reagan was outspoken about his faith it was usually for a purpose, but never for getting votes.

  Paul Kengor

  Purpose, Vote, Outspoken

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• Reagan didn't want to wear his faith on his sleeve in a political way. Reagan thought that was egregious, and he was first turned off by it in the 1976 campaign when he thought Jimmy Carter was doing it. Reagan simply did not want ever to appear to be using faith for political purposes.

  Paul Kengor

  Political, Campaigns, Purpose

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Religious, People, Evil

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Religious, Father, Views

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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

  Paul Kengor

  Good Things, Dangerous

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• [ 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.'

  Paul Kengor

  Liberty, May, Today

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• Colleges need learning, faith, and freedom. Each reinforces the others, each makes the others possible. For what are they without each other?

  Paul Kengor

  College, Needs

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• Freedom cannot exist alone.

  Paul Kengor

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Religious, Feet, Foundation

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

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

  Paul Kengor

  Educational, America, Students

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Appreciation, College, Ivy

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Opportunity, America, President

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

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

  Paul Kengor

  America, Issues, Important

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Political, Understanding, Vision

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Powerful, Men, Rights

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• [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.

  Paul Kengor

  Community, Chicago, Hawaii

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

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

  Paul Kengor

  President, Eleanor, Mccain

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• I noticed some time ago that neither of the candidates are quoting the founders. If they are, they're doing it so rarely that I haven't noticed, or enough to be negligible. Certainly, neither is invoking the image of [George] Washington at Valley Forge or the Shining City Upon a Hill. In addition to this being true for John McCain and Barack Obama, it was true for Hillary Clinton as well.

  Paul Kengor

  Cities, Shining, Valleys

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• A surprise to others, but not to me, since I've watched this closely for eight years now, is how George W. Bush has internalized the founders' belief that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with a certain inherent yearning for freedom. In turn, Bush has applied this to his vision for the Middle East, believing that a democratic transformation in that region is possible, given that inherent desire for liberty within all hearts, including the hearts of Arab Muslims. People disagree with that, which is fine, but that's the Bush vision.

  Paul Kengor

  Believe, Heart, Eight

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• In the middle of Hillary Clinton's push for national healthcare in 1993, Bill Clinton cited Thomas Jefferson's concern for health issues as, somehow, apparently indicative of a need for federal management of the nation's healthcare system.

  Paul Kengor

  Issues, Needs, Bills

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Expansion, Bills, Arguing

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

• 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.

  Paul Kengor

  Children, President, Attention

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org