--- Marilynne Robinson, quoted on Our Favorite Quotes from the President's Conversation with Marilynne Robinson, Obama White House, Oct 2015, cited in Mark Sappenfield, America’s political crisis and the war in Gaza are more intertwined than you might think, CS Monitor, Jul 2024
Excerpt from President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa, The New York Review of Books, Nov 2015 (WaybackMachine)
The President: ... Why did you decide to write this book of essays? And why was fear an important topic, and how does it connect to some of the other work that you’ve been doing?
Robinson: Well, the essays are actually lectures. I give lectures at a fair rate, and then when I’ve given enough of them to make a book, I make a book.
The President: So you just kind of mash them all together?
Robinson: I do. That’s what I do. But it rationalizes my lecturing, too. But fear was very much—is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.
You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?
