Henry Steele Commager Quotes & Sayings

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted. — Henry Steele Commager

The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them. — Henry Steele Commager

The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought. — Henry Steele Commager

America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation. — Henry Steele Commager

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma. — Henry Steele Commager

Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them. — Henry Steele Commager

We should not be surprised that the Founding Fathers didn't foresee everything, when we see that the current Fathers hardly ever foresee anything. — Henry Steele Commager

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. — Henry Steele Commager

History is organized memory, and the organization is all important! — Henry Steele Commager

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. — Henry Steele Commager

Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment. — Henry Steele Commager

What every college must do is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness. — Henry Steele Commager

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it - as with these - life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation. — Henry Steele Commager

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience. — Henry Steele Commager

The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought. — Henry Steele Commager

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. — Henry Steele Commager

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it. — Henry Steele Commager

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow. — Henry Steele Commager

Whether history will judge this war to be different or not we cannot say. But this we can say with certainty: A government and a society that silences those who dissent is one that has lost its way. — Henry Steele Commager

It seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices changed sharply, and that though the standards of the nineteenth century persisted the institutions that had sustained them and the sanctions that had enforced them lost influence and authority. — Henry Steele Commager

To yearn for a single, and usually simple, explanation of the chaotic materials of the past, to search for a single thread in that most tangled of all skeins, is a sign of immaturity. — Henry Steele Commager

Our best people don't go into politics. — Henry Steele Commager

The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged. — Henry Steele Commager

It's awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman. — Henry Steele Commager

The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted. — Henry Steele Commager