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Michael Austin Quotes

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Famous Michael Austin Quotes

“Classical philosophy holds that perpetual agreement with another person is incompatible with friendship. Because no two people can possibly agree on everything, someone who never expresses disagreement with you is acting insincerely - and true friendship requires sincerity above almost everything else.”

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Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“[Ralph Waldo] Emerson believed that any friendship worthy of the name consisted of two essential elements: tenderness, or honest affection not tied to any material interest, and truth, or a willingness to speak sincerely without fear that frankness will destroy the relationship. Simply agreeing with everything someone says is a sign not of friendship but of insincerity. 'Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo,' he writes. Friendship should be 'an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which, beneath these disparities, unites them.”

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Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“I am frequently surprised by how much resistance I encounter when I say that we should try to be friends with people we disagree with. Some people see it as a betrayal of their ideals. More than one of my good friends has told me something like 'You are just wrong about this. We need to call out evil when we see it, even when it hurts someone's feelings. One should always try to be civil, but there is no way that I could ever friends with someone who thinks "x." There are moral principles at stake.' It is precisely because of the moral principles at stake that I believe we must try to be better friends with people who disagree with us. Those who have strong opinions about what should happen in a society have a moral obligation to advocate effectively for their beliefs. If I sincerely believe that something is immoral, then this belief should compel me to find the most effective way possible to keep that thing from happening.”

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Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“Anybody who spends any time at all talking about things like civility, civic friendship, and the quality of our political discourse had better be prepared to talk about Nazis. Call it the 'argumentum ad nazium,' or the 'dicto simplicihitler,' but people seem compelled to let it be known that they have no intention of trying to make friends with Nazis. This is often asserted as a decisive blow. 'Don't talk to me about civility. I don't talk nicely to Nazis; I punch them in the face.' ... Most people who want to carve out a 'Nazi exemption' to the requirements of basic human decency - or any exemption based on a proposition-testing outlier instead of lived experience - are not really trying to to decide what to do in the unlikely event that they run into someone doing 'sieg heil' salutes in the checkout line. They want to create an exempt category and populate it with anybody they can force into the definition. This phenomenon happens across the political spectrum.”

PoliticsFriendshipKindnessDebateCivilityPolarizationCivic Friendship
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“Civic flattery - or a political culture that allows people to appear to engage in civic discourse without ever having their opinions, or even their claims of fact, seriously challenged - is ultimately more damaging to democracy than civic enmity. When we incorporate civic flattery into our personal relationships, we get shallow, insincere friendships. When we use it as the basis for political alliances, we get echo chambers. And when a skilled political manipulator flatters a large portion of the population in an attempt to acquire and consolidate power, we get perhaps the most dangerous test that a democratic society can ever face: the emergence of a demagogue.”

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Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“Ultimately, there is no way that laws or institutions can prevent a democracy from becoming illiberal. All our institutionalized protections can be undone, given enough time, by an unsympathetic majority. The constitution can be amended, new judges can be appointed, agencies can be dismantled, and freedoms can be curtailed. And once a democracy devolves into illiberal majoritarianism, it rarely stays democratic for long. 'If America ever loses its liberty,' Tocqueville prophesied, 'the fault will surely lie with the omnipotence of the majority, which may drive minorities to despair and force them to resort to physical force.' Institutions can slow down the march toward majoritarian tyranny, but they cannot stop it. To remain truly democratic, people have to be willing to protect each other's rights and interests even when they control enough votes to do otherwise. They have to recognize each other's right to exist, express opinions, and participate fully in the political process. And they have to preserve the laws and institutions that guarantee human rights and civil liberties for everyone, not just for the ruling majority. We must have enough regard for each other that we decline to use the mechanisms of democracy to treat our fellow citizens unjustly. Another way to say this is that we must not be enemies. We must be friends.”

PoliticsFriendshipDemocracyEthicsMajority RuleCivic Dialogue
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“The actual rewards that come from arguing with other people have nothing to do with winning and losing. A good argument helps us refine our own ideas and discover where our reasoning is the weakest. Other people's opposition can help us turn our own half-formed ideas into clear assertions backed by solid reasoning. And setting our ideas and opinions against someone else's helps us know each other better, which makes us better friends. We get these benefits from arguments when we collaborate with a partner. We do not get them when we try to destroy an enemy. That is how non-zero-sum games work.”

FriendshipConversationDialogueArgumentsZero Sum GameGame Theory
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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