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Frases de Harry V. Jaffa
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Harry Victor Jaffa was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. Robert P. Kraynak says his "life work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss's revival of natural-right philosophy against the relativism and nihilism of our times."Jaffa wrote on topics ranging from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and natural law. He has been published in the Claremont Review of Books, the Review of Politics, National Review, and the New York Times. His most famous work, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, written in 1959, has been described as "the greatest Lincoln book ever."Jaffa was a formative influence on the American conservative movement, challenging notable conservative thinkers including Russell Kirk, Richard M. Weaver, and Willmoore Kendall on Abraham Lincoln and the founding of the United States. He debated Robert Bork on American constitutionalism. He died in 2015. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. Outubro 1918 – 10. Janeiro 2015
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Harry V. Jaffa: 171   citações 0   Curtidas

Harry V. Jaffa: Frases em inglês

“Every human good we enjoy today is, directly or indirectly, a legacy from what the Founders wrought, and Lincoln preserved. That legacy was formed by what the American Founders called an experiment in free government, at the heart of which is a simple, yet radical idea; that under the laws of nature and of nature's God, all men are created equal. From this idea, and this idea alone, flow all the precepts of free government. If all men are created equal, it is unjust for one man to rule another without his consent. If men possess rights by nature, the purpose of government is to protect our natural liberty. As we know the purpose of government we know also of its limitations, and so we limit the power of government by writing a constitution, and requiring the government as well as citizens to live under the rule of law- laws which must be consented to by the citizens in order to be legitimate.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Before In History (2004)

“Marx saw morality as the great enemy of human well-being and now the society of the future is one in which moral distinctions based upon the Judeo-Christian and Greek tradition will dissolve. Without even knowing it, we are moving into a Communist world. Without a revolution, we are moving into the world that Marx wanted.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Interview with Peter Robinson (2009)

“So the slave issue really under-laid the tariff issue. But it also happened that in the committee which was scheduling the tariffs, the people in South Carolina, and I think other Southerners, moved to raise the tariffs to this abominable level on the assumption that they would be voted down on the floor of the House. And they got fooled by that. Instead of being voted down, it was voted in. They were hoist by their own petard. But in 1833 a compromise was reached. The tariffs were reduced. Jackson’s Force Bill was repealed, and so there was a peaceful resolution of that.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

“A parallel case was the Fugitive Slave Act. Article IV of the Constitution says that any person held to the service or laborer in any state escaping to another state shall not be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be returned to the one to whom the service or labor is due. This is the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“In 1860, the South did not appeal to the right of revolution. They appealed to a right of secession, which they claim to be a Constitutional right under the Constitution itself. In 1776, the colonists did not claim that in breaking with Great Britain they were exercising a right granted by the British Constitution. They had conducted their struggle until that moment by appealing it through the British constitution. But when they decided on independence, they appealed instead to the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

“In 1860 Senator Wilson, like Lincoln, could not ask for recognition of more than the black man's natural rights. But he showed in dramatic fashion that his argument, like Lincoln's, applied ultimately to all rights, civil and political no less than natural.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

Fonte: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 228

“The 14th Amendment was intended to drive a stake through the heart of Dred Scott. The heart of that opinion consisted in the assertion that Negroes were so far inferior that they had no rights which white men were bound to respect. This meant that as far as the Constitution was concerned, the distance between whites and blacks was no less than the distance between whites and any other inferior species. A white man had the same right to rule a Negro as he had to rule dog or a horse. Hence according to Taney blacks were not and could not have been included in the proposition "that all men are created equal." Whether or not they were intended to be so included was among the questions most fiercely debated by Lincoln and Douglas.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Logic of the Colorblind Constitution (2004)

“Lincoln thought slavery was wrong and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Interview with Peter Robinson (2009)

“And so, the idea of slave property contradicts the idea of private property, and the Southerners taking their stand on their property rights and their slaves were, in fact, taking their stand on a principle which was incompatible with the idea of constitutional government.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

“Well, in the first place, I deny that Lincoln acted unconstitutionally at any time during the Civil War. It was a civil war. There were traitors in the midst of all of the free states. The possibility of recruiting soldiers and keeping them from deserting. There was lots of desertion on both sides of the Civil War, and it just happens that there were more Confederate soldiers executed for desertion than there were Union soldiers. But there were plenty of executions on both sides.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

“Don't we hear nowadays objections on the part of the labor unions to importing goods from China, which are made with slave labor? Is the existence of slave labor not a reflection upon the idea of a free commercial society?”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

“I myself believe in free trade and would be glad it could be implemented whenever possible. But in the actual conflict that led to the Civil War, we had two obstacles to free trade, and I ask you to think which one of them was the greater obstacle. One was the tariff, and the other was slavery.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

“[I]t is impossible for men who exercise their reason to believe that any one part of the human race has been marked out by God or nature as so superior to any other. No man is by nature, or by manifest declaration of God's will, the possessor or possession, the master or slave, of another. Whoever asserts such a right to such domination or possession is, in Congress's words from that same document, 'rightfully resistible.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

Fonte: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 370

“[T]he generation of the Founding Fathers, who certainly knew the story of Noah and his sons, nonetheless believed in the equality of the races.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

Fonte: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 224

“"Diversity" as an abstraction has no meaning. Today, however, it means racial preference and nothing else. A commitment to diversity, apart from the ends it may serve, is absurd.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Is Diversity Good? (2003)

“The seven states of the Deep South, the same seven states that seceded after Lincoln's election and before his inauguration, demanded as a plank in the Democratic platform, without which they would not support Douglas, a slave code for the territories.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

“We see here the essence of the southern understanding of equality, why it was so highly prized, and why so resolutely defended. Every white man can be proud of himself, can consider himself an aristocrat, not because of his virtues or accomplishments, but simply because he is not black! By rejecting the principle that all men are created equal, by keeping "the degenerate sons of Ham" under foot, and under the lash, one need never do anything to become important, like members of the royal family. It is not without reason that Lincoln compared slavery to the divine right of kings! Calhoun demanded equality no less than Lincoln. But his equality required a "cornerstone" of slavery.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

“According to Davis it did not require a Galileo or a Harvey (or a Darwin) to discover the natural inferiority of the Negro. All that was necessary was a visit to the District of Columbia jail!”

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Harry V. Jaffa

Fonte: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 226

“Much has been written about Jefferson himself being laggard, later in life, in his efforts against slavery. But in Jefferson the draftsman and spokesman for the American people in the American Revolution, the man of whom Lincoln would say that he 'was, is, and perhaps will continue to be, the most distinguished politician of our history', there was never the least equivocation as to slavery's injustice and immorality.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

Fonte: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 23

“That moral order, we know, encompasses, beside the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, many other rights, as for example the right to the free exercise of religion, to freedom of speech and of the press, and to freedom of association. These are rights antecedent to the political process-rights that do not depend upon majority will-rights that majorities may not violate. They are all features of the moral "laws of nature and of nature's God." Clearly, the implications of the President's endorsement of the idea of a moral order, antecedent to all positive law, including the law of the Constitution, go far beyond the debate over abortion.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

“We have to return to the political thought of the American founders and Abraham Lincoln. Nothing is at stake but the salvation of Western civilization.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Interview with Peter Robinson (2009)

“If we are to have a foundation upon which to continue to build a more perfect union, we must return unequivocally, as Lincoln returned, to the source of our greatness in the American Founding.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the American Cause

“The principles upon which this nation was founded are those upon which its survival, no less than its prosperity, depend. These are the principles upon which we believe our freedom and prosperity as individuals, and that of our children depend. These principles are simple and familiar enough for anyone to understand who wishes to understand. Selfish motives, miseducation, or ideological blindness may lead some to deny or disparage them. But nothing can obscure their shining truth… Lincoln at Gettysburg said that the nation, at its birth, had been dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Earlier, Lincoln had said that the proposition of equality was the 'central idea' of the founding, from which all its minor thoughts emanated.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, God Bless America (2008)

“Douglas accepted Dred Scott, and in Dred Scott, the Chief Justice had said that the right to own slaves is expressly affirmed in the Constitution. And Lincoln said in the debates that it was implied but not expressly affirmed. The argument against any restriction on slavery was that any right expressly affirmed in the Constitution takes precedent over any law or regulation in any jurisdiction whatever. (Remember, the supremacy clause in Article VI of the Constitution says that this Constitution, and the laws and treaties made in pursuance thereof, are the supreme law of land—anything in any law or a constitution of any state to the contrary not withstanding.)”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“Alexander Hamilton Stephens' Constitutional View of the War Between the States, which was and remains probably the best defense of the Confederate cause. It is all about states' rights, and the defense of the minority against the tyranny of the numerical majority, although the "silent minority", the four million slaves, are never counted. It is substantially the book that Calhoun would have written had he been alive to do so. Stephens, who was Vice President of the Confederacy, had also been widely known, north and south, as one of the intellectual luminaries of his time.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

“The President's proclamation is a mighty blow against the legal positivism that infects our legal establishment, and the moral relativism that pervades our society. But this can only be the beginning of a far greater struggle than that against the physical danger of terrorism. It means taking up once again the burden Lincoln bore, in reasserting the truth of the Declaration, against the "positive good" theory of slavery, and against the still more deadly theory that majorities, and not the difference between right and wrong, should decide the future of slavery.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

“Douglas was a radical expansionist. Both parts of the Democratic Party in 1860 called for the annexation of Cuba. And there were 100,000 slaves in Cuba, and Cuba was the place that slaves were still being brought from Africa and then resold in the United States. So under a Douglas presidency, we would have taken over the rest of Mexico and Central America whenever we had the resources and the appetite to take to do so. You can be sure that most of the Mexicans would have either been reduced to peonage or to slavery. In the Mexican War itself, in case you don’t know it, we appropriated 60 percent of the land area of Mexico as it was then defined through the Spanish Conquest. So we increased the size of the United States by 40 percent and reduced Mexico by 60 percent.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“On the question of the gentlemanliness of the debate, I'm reminded that in the Congress, just before the Civil War, the Senator from New Hampshire, I think, made an anti-slavery speech, and a Senator from Mississippi, not Jefferson Davis, invited him to come down to Mississippi to make that speech, promising to see that he was hanged from the highest tree in the forest. The Senator from New Hampshire invited the Senator from Mississippi to come to New Hampshire where he would be given a respectful hearing in every township in that State.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002)

“And Lincoln said that if you believe in the Fugitive Slave Act being required by Article IV, you must also believe that the protection of the slave owner and the territories deserves federal protection; the two arguments were perfectly parallel. Douglas said it didn’t matter how the Supreme Court in the abstract decided the question of slavery in the territories; if the slave owner went to the territory, he had to get local regulations to protect his property.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“The vice-president and the president of the Confederate States of America grounded their justification of American slavery on the grounds of a fraudulent science and a crazy fundamentalism. No sane person today can regard them as other than pathetic reminders of a society, like Nazi Germany, mentally unbalanced by its commitment to human inequality.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

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