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The Devil's Advocate

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Morris L. West

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“I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free - but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one's own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing... I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place.”

BeliefAtheismGiacomo Nerone
Book:The Devil's Advocate
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“Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit.”

GodFaithSexSexualityGiacomo Nerone
Book:The Devil's Advocate
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“Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.”

PoliticsNationalismOne World GovernmentLocal GovernmentInternationalism
Book:What I Saw in America
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“Despite having become an urban nation in the last century, Americans still have yet to come to terms with the exercise of urban democratic power. To do so requires treating cities as something other than consumption preferences or as location providers for agglomeration-seeking firms, or as entities that are incompetent, corrupt, and in need of discipline. We have to think instead of the city as a process of economic development, as a generator of the middle class, and as the primary location for the exercise of robust self-government.”

CitiesLocal Government
Author:Richard Schragger
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“Consider one of the most important developments in local government finance in the last 50 years - state constitutional taxation and spending limitations. Starting with Proposition 13 in California, adopted in 1978, many states began to severely limit local governments' ability to tax and spend. In the California case, these limits were arguably spurred by rapid rises in property values as newcomers found their way to California in the 1970s. Again, an institutional reaction appear to *follow* economic growth - California was growing rapidly and existing residents were concerned about the fiscal effects brought about by the influx of immigrants. Colorado's Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), adopted in 1992, also appears to have been in part a reaction to rising tax rates brought about by increasing service demands of increasing populations.”

DebtTaxationLocal Government
Author:Richard Schragger
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“Citizens hold a powerful tool: the ability to choose civility at the ballot box. That choice has ripple effects. When we elect leaders who practice self-control, respect & collaboration, we get stronger communities.”

DemocracyCivilityElectionsLocal GovernmentCommunitiesBallot BoxChoose CivilityCivic Leaders
Book:Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community & What to Do About It
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