Commager Henry Quotes & Sayings

What powers our work when it's no longer about addiction to achievement? — Shauna Niequist

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

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

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

I made myself a glass of chocolate milk using enough syrup for three normal glasses. I also made myself four peanut butter crackers. Then I walked out the living room door to our terrace. The trees were coming! New green was all over ... green so new that it was kissing yellow. — E.L. Konigsburg

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

You get to the middle of a take that's going really well and the camera will run out of film. They have to stop you, apologize and then you've got to get things going all over again. — David Morse

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

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

I just want to have a great relationship with my child and have a great family dynamic. — Tori Spelling

I'm so proud of myself. I thought, 'I've got to learn about American history.' I literally took two months off and watched every documentary known to man. I really didn't know Benjamin Franklin was so cool. — Rene Russo

An Olympic rowing career had left Porter Collins a bit inured to the pain of others, as he assumed they usually didn't know what pain was. No, — Michael Lewis

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

In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born. — Ben Horowitz

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

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

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

I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn't produce for me - and I didn't think it would - nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture. — Raymond Chandler

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

Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything - even die. — Greg Mortenson

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

The biggest kick I get is to communicate with those who are exiled from the game - in hospitals, homes, prisons - those who have seldom seen a game, who can't travel to a game, those who are blind. — Jack Buck

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

Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad. — Lee Child

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

I am a misanthrope, but exceedingly benevolent; I am very cranky, and am a super-idealist ... I can digest philosophy better than food. — Alfred Nobel

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