The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin: What She Believes and What It Means for America

The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin: What She Believes and What It Means for America by Stephen Mansfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stephen Manfield can really crank out the books. It would be interesting to see how many he has written in the last ten years. In this book he does a good job of presenting a fair view of Sarah Palin. I agree with Sarah Palin on about 95% of her views but for some reason I do not see her as President of the United States. If you want to read a fair account of her life and views this is a book for you. As always in Manfield's books he quotes from lots of people. You will see in the quotes below that is again true in this book.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.  ~Robert A. Heinlein

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.  ~C. S. Lewis "Mere Christianity"

Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.  ~Mao Tse-Tung "On Protracted War"

There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. ... The results of their thought-world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo's chisel, and it is true of a dictator's sword.  ~Francis Schaeffer "How Should We Then Live?"

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A classic example of Paul Harvey's instructive artistry is an economics object lesson he repeated many times throughout his five decades on American radios. It begin with the jarring declaration, "The pilgrim fathers of the United States were communists." Harvey goes on to describe how the first Massachusetts colonists under Governor Bradford began their farming operations as a commune - laboring together on a common plot of land - and how they almost starved to death. Only when these Pilgrims switched to a system of private farming did productivity soar, thus leading to the first Thanksgiving. Harvey finished this historical parable with the words, "The communist experiment in America - as with all communist experiments, past, present, and future - was foredoomed to failure.

C. S. Lewis in "The Abolition of Man" defends and upholds the validity of science but warns that without the restraining, humanizing, and civilizing role of moral truth, science becomes a threat to freedom.  One of the most influential and widely quoted chapters from "The Abolition of Man" is titled "Men Without Chests." The premise of the section is a metaphor in which humans are three-part creatures - the head (intellect) on top, the stomach (appetites) at the bottom, and in between, the chest (the repository of faith, compassion, and character) mediating between and elevating the other two. It is a devastating critique of the two ascendant trends of our day - nihilistic hedonism on the one hand (stomach people) or atheistic rationalism on the other (head people).  Lewis observed that those who build a culture on intellect and appetite alone want the vital virtues of chest but categorically reject the moral codes and moral accountability necessary to create them. He wrote that the educators and leaders of such a time "make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great treat to freedom is the concentration of power. ... Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.  ~Milton Friedman "Capitalism and Freedom"

Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.  ~Robert Jarvik

In forty hours I shall be in battle, with little information, and on the spur of the moment will have to make the most momentous decisions. But I believe that one's spirit enlarges with responsibility and that, with God's help, I shall make them, and make them right.  ~General George S. Patton

This is quite a game, politics. ... There are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends. Only permanent interests.  William Clay

Hadn't the Pilgrims sailed, as they said in their "Mayflower Compact," "for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith"? Hadn't the first Congress declared, "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education of education shall forever be encouraged"? Weren't the speeches of nearly all the presidents filled with Bible verses and references to faith? And hadn't a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court written as late as the 1950's, "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being"?

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me . ... You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.  ~Jesus of Nazareth

In war you can only be killed once. But in politics many times.  ~Winston Churchill



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