The West has given us the liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction.

The West has given the world the symphony, and the novel.

Western society is a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives; it is a society of boundless private charity; it is a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth.

Each time you admire the façade of the New York Public Library, you are paying homage to Western civilization.

The West has given us the liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction.

The great ideas of the West - rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, thought, and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy- quite an achievement, surely, for any civilization- - remain the best, and perhaps the only, means for all people, no matter of what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom.

I wish more people would belabor the obvious, and more often.