Quotes by "Ben Sasse"

Yet despite the complexity of contemporary society, there are still some simple formulas we can use to distill the path to social and economic flourishing. One of these, labeled the “Success Sequence,” and credited to Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the left-of-center Brookings Institute, proposes a three-step rule book for modern American life: 1. Finish high school. 2. Get a job. (Any job. Because working leads to more working, which leads to better jobs.) 3. Get married before having children. When people follow this pattern—and crucially, in this order—life generally turns out pretty well.

If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions and awaking the curiosity in the soul of each citizen. National greatness will not be recovered via a mindless expansion of bureaucratized schooling. Seventy years ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote, 'Sure, we demand another grant of money, we postpone the school leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. We demand that teachers further slave conscientiously in and out of school hours. But to what end? I believe,' Sayers lamented, 'all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have no definable goal for each child to become a fully formed adult. We have lost the tools of learning, sacrificing them to the piecemeal, subject matter approach of bureaucratized schooling that finally compromises to produce passive rather than active emerging adults. But our kids are not commodities, they are plants. They require a protected environment, and care, and feeding, but most basically, an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight. What we need is the equipping of each child with those lost tools.

I'm from a farm town that when I was a kid was about an hour outside of Omaha.

An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community - and a culture.

Obamacare arrived also because Republicans failed to persuade the public that we could address the avalanche of problems government had already created by decades of interfering with the health-care market.

Democrats have bad ideas and Republicans have no ideas.

Obamacare has eliminated choices for millions of families, suffocated patient-centered medical innovation, and moved the United States closer to European-style centralized planning.

We lack an educated, resilient citizenry capable of navigating the increasing complexities of daily life.

There's no Democratic and Republican seats or gyms or coffee shops at the Supreme Court. Every American should be able to celebrate the fact that we aspire to nine justices who are looking to defend our rights and to defend the Constitution, not to advance policy preferences.

The Chinese Communist Party and the American people are locked in conflict.

With a population of 1.4 billion, China is a lucrative market. But getting into that market isn't cheap. At best, the price of doing business in China is silence; at worst, it's reading talking points straight from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing is not subtle about it.

Most healthy people want to coach Little League, they want to go to church and they want to have great coworkers at the office and they want to put on faceplate when Nebraska's point football on Saturdays. That's the most natural way to live.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. 'Peter Pan' is a dystopia, and we forget that. Neverland is a bad place to be.

American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad.

The American work ethic is, thankfully, still deeply engraved in rural Nebraska souls. This is who we are, and we here in Nebraska have far more to teach Washington, D.C. than Washington, D.C. has to teach us.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.