Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Quotes & Sayings

The issue is the ethnocentric history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. Cn any historian justify the proposition that the five ethnic communities into which the New York state task force wishes to divide the country had equal influence on the development of the United States? Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality? — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

What higher obligation does a President have than to explain his intentions to the people and persuade them that the direction he wishes to go is right? — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

History is full of surprises. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

History is, indeed, an argument without end. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man
these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity. History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

In Defense of the World Order ... U.S. soldiers would have to kill and die. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Excellence is the eternal quest. We achieve it by living up to our highest intellectual standards and our finest moral intuitions. In seeking excellence, take life seriously-but never yourself! — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Righteousness is easy in retrospect. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

for an informed judgment — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

History, in the end, becomes a form of irony. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions ... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue ... — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist - in his own phrase, a "utopian Socialist." He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Some people must dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

All wars are popular for the first 30 days. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

I don't think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Total separation of church and state was considered the best safeguard for the health of each. As [Andrew] Jackson explained, in refusing to name a fast day, he feared to 'disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country, in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government.' — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Instead of casting off the foreign skin, as John Quincy Adams had stipulated, never to resume it, the fashion is to resume the foreign skin as conspicuously as can be. The cult of ethnicity has reversed the movement of American history, producing a nation of minorities - or at least of minority spokesmen - less interested in joining with the majority in common endeavor than in declaring their alienation from oppressive, white, patriarchal, racist, sexist, classist society. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The military struggle may frankly be regarded for what it actually was, namely a war for independence, an armed attempt to imposethe views of the revolutionists upon the British government and large sections of the colonial population at whatever cost to freedom of opinion or the sanctity of life and property. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Certainly the European overlords did little enough to prepare Africa for self-government but Democracy would find it hard in any case to put down roots in a tribalist and patrimonial culture that long before the west invaded Africa had sacralized the personal authority of chieftains and ordained the submission of the rest. What the west would call corruption is regarded through much of Africa as no more than the prerogative of power. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Leadership ignites the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

His peroration, no doubt — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The very discovery of the New world was the by-product of a dietary quest. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights ... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide ... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality ... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

This isn't a matter for the eyes, it is a matter for the heart. Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory, they become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going. So a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. When I'm depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity, the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy
also cheap, — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next). — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Yet I believe the campaign against the idea of common ideals and a single society will fail. Gunnar Myrdal was surely right: for all the damage it has done, the upsurge of ethnicity is a superficial enthusiasm stirred by romantic ideologues and unscrupulous hucksters whose claim to speak for their minorities is thoughtlessly accepted by the media. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Every President reconstructs the Presidency to meet his own psychological needs. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

But in general one senses a certain inauthenticity in saddling public schools with the mission of convincing children of the beauties of their particular ethnic origins. Ethnic subcultures, if they had genuine vitality, would be sufficiently instilled in children by family, church, and community. It is surely not the office of the public school to promote artificial ethnic chauvinism. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

but also where the — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

For Robert the experience was another step in education. He was learning in particular that patriotic declarations did not make due process of law superfluous and that he owed a debt to his own inner standards. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Honest history is the weapon of freedom. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The only President who clearly died of overwork was Polk, and that was a long time ago. Hoover, who worked intensely and humorlessly as President, lived for more than thirty years after the White House; Truman, who worked intensely and gaily, lived for twenty — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

There is far less to the Presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.