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People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

Amity Shlaes

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Amity Shlaes
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 10
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Merely
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Hindu
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More quotes by Amity Shlaes

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Today we care about budgets more than anything. Our American future hangs on the ability of government to cut budget.
Amity Shlaes
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Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn't start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes brought in extra revenue. The success of his and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's experiment with rate cuts has been obscured by our modern history books.
Amity Shlaes
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Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.
Amity Shlaes
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Coolidge's stat was so low he's ranked in the bottom half of presidents. What I found when I encountered this man was the leader I might like to see today.
Amity Shlaes
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I think the Bushes would have liked President Coolidge, though I often wonder what nickname 43 would pick for 30. President Bush has great respect for his father, and so did President Coolidge, whose father was also in government, albeit in a smaller way.
Amity Shlaes
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The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.
Amity Shlaes
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The 1920s are the decade that signaled the arrival of a gift that still means a lot to us: Saturday.
Amity Shlaes
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Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency.
Amity Shlaes
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Fame is worth less than service.
Amity Shlaes
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Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.
Amity Shlaes
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With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.
Amity Shlaes
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Economics are part of our life. We try to treat them separately, like over there is the economy and here is history. Econ affects history and history often doesn't get it right if it doesn't respect econ.
Amity Shlaes
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There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.
Amity Shlaes
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Coolidge showed that the best government was the one that got out of the way. When he refrained, the economy grew, the Ku Klux Klan faded, and Americans got Model A's and automobiles.
Amity Shlaes
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Coolidge was a federalist. You go back and read him and it's almost intimidating to write about him because he writes better himself than anyone. He's one of the best writers as presidents go.
Amity Shlaes
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To investors, job creation is a second-order effect. Market participants care first about interest rates, exchange rates, bond prices and the one great factor that affects all three: the long-term solvency of a bond company called the U.S. government.
Amity Shlaes
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Coolidge cut the budget, and even better, cut it during peace and prosperity. He left a federal budget lower than the one that greeted him when he arrived in office. He managed to freeze or cut the budget over more than five years in office. If you look at charts of presidents - Nixon, Ike, and Reagan - you see them failing on this score.
Amity Shlaes
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Our conscience, our faith, our local community, even our online hobby clubs - all civilize us.
Amity Shlaes
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We're in a kind of vicious cycle where the media tell the politicians, and the politicians tell the people, that perception is reality, and the perception of saving dooms a politician. I don't believe perception is reality, or that all Americans think that.
Amity Shlaes
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Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with.
Amity Shlaes