New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.
Donna: [After Sam learns the identity of a deceased Communist spy] It was people pushing paper around fifty years ago. Why does it matter? Sam: It was high treason, and it mattered a great deal! This country is an idea, and one that’s lit the world for two centuries and treason against that idea is not just a crime against the living! This ground holds the graves of people who died for it, who gave what Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion, of fidelity.
