when political action succeeds in generating real power, the participants experience a kind of happiness different from the kinds of happinesses one finds in private life....
Public happiness is not isolating but shared. It is the happiness of being free among other free people, of having one's public faith redeemed and returned, of seeing public hope becoming public power, becoming reality itself. It is the happiness of experiencing the moment when history is no longer an alien force by which one is squeezed and buffeted about, but is what one is doing now....