#greg weiner

“Without the fall, there is not only no grace; there is no virtue. There is no struggle. There is nothing that gives human life meaning.”

“This normative commitment to popular government must be understood in the context of Madison’s empirical belief that majority rule was inevitable, something like a law of nature, in republican societies. Perhaps the most consistent assumption behind his political thought was the futility of what he dismissed as ‘parchment barriers’ that attempted to impose rules without regard for the political and sociological realities in which they would operate.”