Extended excerpt: [First lines from newspaper essay] “A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride, and Truman’s are now good enemies. Hearst accuses him of “squandermania,” John O’Donnell says he is forcing a “galloping communism” on the country, Arthur Krock is alarmed at the idea of the government going into steel and calls the program “state socialism.” These are only the first pipings of what will soon swell into a chorus of shocked outrage.” (p. 413)

Source: Editor’s copy – The Unfinished Country (1959) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 638380186

Extended excerpt: “Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.” (pp. 12-13)

Source: Library – Actions and Passions (1949) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 471645694

Extended excerpt [Essay on German chancellor Adolf Hitler and Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf]:

“We must ride ourselves of the view that only logical ideas can be political weapons. Ideas in politics are much like poetry: they need no inner logical structure to be effective. Edward Lear’s nonsense verse merely extends a principle inherent in poetry as a whole. And Hitler is, in a sense, the Edward Lear of political thinking.” (p. 129)

Source notes: In the quote above, Lerner references English painter & author Edward Lear (1812-1888).  Lear was known for his limericks and use of “nonsense words” to explore serious subjects like depression.

Lerner’s essay, “Hitler as a Thinker,” was also published in his 1939 book Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1939). The cited quote can be found on page 357 of this text edition.

Source link [Featured source – magazine]: “Hitler as Thinker” (22 November 1939) New Republic; New Republic archive online via EBSCOHost [subscription service]: http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=99674ced-52f9-4889-bb15-2e9ace6aa473%40sessionmgr4009&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=14984384&db=fjh

Source [Featured source – text]: Library – Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (1939) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 264954

Extended excerpt:[Essay – chapter four: ‘Democracy: Mask and Face’]:

“Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted. But out of the wrack of recent events has emerged a new sense of its attractiveness. We are living today on the thin edge of history, and that does an enormous amount to change our perspectives. (p. 87)

Source: Library – It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1943) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 317044251

Extended excerpt [Final lines, newspaper essay]:

“I suspect the reason is that to face death is to be compelled to examine searchingly what you have made of life. And most of us would rather not look at that Gorgon’s head. Bacon said that “men fear death as children fear to walk in the dark,” but perhaps he was wrong – perhaps what we welcome most about death is the dark, and it is only when we have to face it in the full light of day and make our reckoning of it that it requires courage.” (p. 83)

Source: Editor’s copy – The Unfinished Country (1959) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 638380186

Extended excerpt [Final lines of newspaper essay. Lerner was born in Russia & emigrated to the United States with his parents.]:

“The Russians have the capacity to gather all the current research and apply it systematically to their technology. But they are the last conceivable model for us to follow in education itself, which should lead to the stretching of the mind, not its hardening, and to the fulfillment of the personality, not its mutilation. The Russians train; they do not dare educate.” (p. 219)

Source: Editor’s copy – The Unfinished Country (1959) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 638380186

Extended excerpt [Essay]:

“The danger is that, having concluded that the long-run forces of history are on our side, we shall not stir ourselves to act within the framework of those forces and so translate tendencies into realities. We err if we act on impulse or for action’s sake, with disregard of the lines of force discernible in history. But we err also if we trust blindly to the impersonal forces of history, whether the trust be that of the idealist who sees in the logic of events the divine triumph of truth, or the materialist who sees in it the ruthless march of technological imperatives. Actually the so-called “lessons” of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.” (p. 255)

Source: Library – It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1943) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 317044251

Extended excerpt [Newspaper essay.]:

“This is an education in itself – perhaps a better education than the schoolbooks will ever be able to give. The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.” (pp. 538-539)

Source note: In the essay cited above, Lerner was referencing contemporary news related to American school desegregation. Earlier that same month, African American high school student Dorothy Counts withdrew from an all-white public school after enduring four days of intense physical and verbal harassment and threats. At the time Lerner’s article was published, another group of students known as the “Little Rock Nine” were also facing racist mobs while attending class at Little Rock Central High School.

Source: Editor’s copy – The Unfinished Country (1959) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 638380186

Extended excerpt [Essay]:

“I say that the way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.” (p. 335)

Source: Library – Actions and Passions (1949) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 471645694

Extended excerpt [Essay – Chapter two: ‘Civilization is a Death Dance’]:

“Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?” someone asks, as though he were asking: “Are you bullish or bearish about the market?” The only answer can be that, if we have as little control over our institutions as an outsider has over the fluctuations of the market, then we are all lost. We mold our institutions and are molded by them. We are the hammer and the anvil. Civilization today is a death dance because of the accumulated weight of idiot institutions. Our task is the heroic one of changing and directing those institutions so that their weight will support us, instead of crushing us.” (pp. 57-58)

Source: Library – It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1943) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 317044251

Extended excerpt [Newspaper essay, referencing the murder of Emmett Till and subsequent trial of the men who killed him.]:

“As for the other jurors and the two men, and the wife who was the cause of it all, what can we say except that when evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable. The capacity for self-delusion is a built-in part of the psychosis.” (p. 517)

Source note: Lerner is referring to the Emmett Till murder trail verdict. J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, had kidnapped, beaten & murdered 14 –year-old Emmett Till after Till allegedly whistled at Bryant’s wife. Despite amble evidence, the local, all-white jury ruled that Bryant & Milam were ‘not guilty’ and they were set free. Just a few months after the verdict & Lerner’s column, Milam & Bryant – now protected against prosecution by U.S. double jeopardy law – admitted to killing Till and dumping his body in a river.

Source: Editor’s copy – The Unfinished Country (1959) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 638380186