Thomas Ricks
speaker
222 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4 Jul
Thomas Ricks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But you're right.
We're left with a country nowadays where if you take the dollar bill out of your pocket, there's Latin on both sides.
If you look at the center of our political universe, the U.S.
Capitol is named for a hill in Rome, the Capitoline Hill.
The Democratic Party comes from a Greek word.
The Republican Party comes from a Latin word.
So it is all around us, but we don't even see what is in front of our eyes.
In the 18th century, by contrast, one of the most popular plays of the century was the play Cato by Joseph Addison.
a favorite of George Washington, who was not steeped in the classics, yet really absorbed it from the culture around him.
Two lines in that play are really striking.
At one point, one character regrets that they have only one life to give to Rome.
And another character says, give me liberty or give me death.
And so when politicians quoted those, people knew what they were referring to.
These days, we think they're just hot quotes from the revolutionary era, not realizing they were quoting, it's the equivalent these days of quoting Casablanca or Ghostbusters.
That's a very good way of putting it.
Let's put on a musical.
Right.
One of my favorite moments in the book is when his vice president, John Adams, was having an argument with Timothy Pickering, who soon was to become postmaster general.
And they were arguing about whether Washington was illiterate.
And Adams says, no, he wasn't a literate.
Showing 21–40 of 222 · page 2 of 12
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