For our everyday life is becoming so saturated with the tremendous power of mass communications that any unpopular or unorthodox course arouses a storm of protests such as John Quincy Adams-under attack in 1807-could never have envisioned. “Today the challenge of political courage looms larger than ever before. Profiles in Courage: Deluxe Modern Classic We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves.” But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. Only the strength and progress and peaceful change that come from independent judgment and individual ideas-and even from the unorthodox and the eccentric-can enable us to surpass that foreign ideology that fears free thought more than it fears hydrogen bombs. But today this nation cannot tolerate the luxury of such lazy political habits. It would be more comfortable to continue to move and vote in platoons, joining whomever of our colleagues are equally enslaved by some current fashion, raging prejudice or popular movement. “Of course, it would be much easier if we could all continue to think in traditional political patterns-of liberalism and conservatism, as Republicans and Democrats, from the viewpoint of North and South, management and labor, business and consumer or some equally narrow framework.
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