Schlesinger 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.

We taped all this and then got it transcribed and picked the best lines or ideas or ways to take a scene. I've done that many times, and it can improve the script but also wreck a perfectly good scene. — John Schlesinger

Either I need an assignment with a strict deadline - like something for a movie or a TV show or whatever - or else I need to create a made-up deadline for myself for my own records. Otherwise, I don't write anything. — Adam Schlesinger

It would probably be better if I got involved in fewer things just because I'd have more time to write for my own purposes ... But if somebody calls you up with a really cool project, it's hard to just say 'no' because you don't feel like working. — Adam Schlesinger

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

Hollywood is an extraordinary kind of temporary place. — John Schlesinger

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.

Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He — John Updike

Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-'70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap. — Adam Schlesinger

Every year, there's some band that plays guitar-oriented pop music that has a single, but for the most part, it's kind of relegated to the sidelines. — Adam Schlesinger

Under budgetary pressure (arbitrary or not) it is truly remarkable how many options one discovers one can do without. — James R. Schlesinger

For me, it's just more satisfying when you follow the rules rather than just make a bunch of sounds. The magic of just making noise in the studio goes away after a while. — Adam Schlesinger

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

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail. — Adam Schlesinger

Making your own records is really satisfying in the sense that you more or less get to do what you want. It may not sell or whatever, but on an artistic level, the only people that you really have to fight with are the people in your own band. — Adam Schlesinger

Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values. — Arthur M. Schlesinger

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

I've never really had the desire to be a front person or a solo artist. I don't really create that much of a hierarchy in my mind. — Adam Schlesinger

Your job as a producer is to make suggestions without putting your ego in front of everything else. Also, I think you want to focus on that artist's best qualities and really highlight them. — Adam Schlesinger

for an informed judgment — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

We are not good at recognizing distant threats even if their probability is 100%. Society ignoring [peak oil] is like the people of Pompeii ignoring the rumblings below Vesuvius. — James R. Schlesinger

The notion of a defense that will protect American cities is one that will not be achieved, but it is that goal that supplies the political magic, as it were, in the president's vision. — James R. Schlesinger

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

I met a hustler at a dinner party. He had been invited because I was looking for an adviser to help me with the street scenes. So we put him on the film. — John Schlesinger

With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics - maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it's much more about the atmosphere and the vibe. — Adam Schlesinger

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.

I think people sometimes confuse 'catchy' with something that should automatically be a hit in today's world. I mean, obviously we write a lot of stuff that's catchy, that sticks in your head. But that doesn't necessarily mean that middle-school kids are going to want to listen to a song about a lawyer or a Subaru or whatever. — Adam Schlesinger

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.

All wars are popular for the first 30 days. — 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.

I have a feeling he felt Jon Voight had run away with the film, which he didn't, though he was brilliant in it, in a much less easy part. I just don't know what had got into him, but something had. — John Schlesinger

I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I'll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all. — Adam Schlesinger

I always have to be thinking about who's going to be singing this song, what the context is. I don't sit around just writing in a vacuum, ever. — Adam Schlesinger

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.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger has pointed out that people tend to get interested in politics again every 30 years. The universe moves in cycles of three. The number figures in everything from Pythagoras's theory that the universe is based on three to the Father-the-Son-and-the-Holy- Ghost to the three-sided pyramidal shapes that intersect in the Jewish Star of David. The notion of the mystical three, metaphysically, spiritually, and even politically, is quite interesting to me. — Marianne Williamson

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. — Arthur M. Schlesinger

but also where the — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

I'm an idealist without illusions.
[Ca. 1953, attributed to John F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 'A Thousand Days' — John F. Kennedy

I just like to stay busy, and I like to work with interesting people. — Adam Schlesinger

Making a film is like going down a mine-once you've started you bid a metaphoricalgoodbye to the daylight and the outside world for the duration. — John Schlesinger

Yes, but I think if you look at it with a sort of gay sensibility and want everything to be positive about gay life, it could be interpreted as antigay. — John Schlesinger

A song sometimes ends up with its own internal logic. — Adam Schlesinger

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.

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.

I am not very regimented unless I have to be. I wish I was someone that could just write every day, but I tend to work on specific projects for a specific period of time and then stop. — Adam Schlesinger

Enrollment is not about getting somebody to do something that you want them to do. It's about offering them the chance to do something they might want to do (in this case, becoming part of your effort). — Leonard A. Schlesinger

Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking, — Robert A. Caro

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.

Oil production should peak out around the world in the early 1990s ... That means in five years' time we may have chewed up most of the possibility of further expansion of oil production. — James R. Schlesinger

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

Yeah, Jody [Porter] left. He's a great guitar player. We have a guy named Phil Hurley who is going to go out on tour with us now. I'm not sure if he'll end up as the permanent guitar player, but he's the type of guy who can kind of step in and play anything. He was with the Gigolo Ants before, and he's really good. — Adam Schlesinger

Cheap Trick has played with every band on the planet. — Adam Schlesinger

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.

Truman makes friends without influencing people,' noted Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 'Dewey influences people without making friends. — David Pietrusza

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

The nature of the music business is such that it's better to have a few chances for some things to be successful than just one, and that's kind of been my attitude all along. — Adam Schlesinger

It's always been my philosophy to keep a lot of balls in the air. With music, most things don't pan out, so you try to increase your odds by being involved with a million things at once. — Adam Schlesinger

We have only two modes - complacency and panic. — James R. Schlesinger

Few would argue against safe-guarding the nation. But in the judgment of at least one of the country's most distinguished presidential scholars, the legal steps taken by the Bush Administration in its war against terrorism were a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and traditions: more significant than John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, than Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Collectively, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the Bush Administration's extralegal counter-terrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history. — Jane Mayer

I'll never forget the first screening at the Berlin Film Festival. As soon as the film ended there was an outbreak of booing, which made us look at each other with some surprise. — John Schlesinger

When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story. — Adam Schlesinger

I just try to tell a story rather than present an open diary to the world. — Adam Schlesinger

I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not. — Dennis Prager

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.

At John Schlesinger's funeral at a synagogue in St John's Wood some years ago the person I stood next to said to me encouragingly, 'Come on, Stephen - you're not singing. Have a go!' 'Believe me, Paul, you don't want me to,' I said. Besides, I was having a much better time listening to him. 'No. Go on!' So I joined in the chorus. 'You're right,' Paul McCartney conceded. 'You can't sing. — Stephen Fry

I built up a knowledge of 1960s and '70s British films because my dad used to work nights, and I'd sit up with my mum and watch films - 'How I Won the War' and the films of Richard Lester, Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger. — Nick Moran

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

I don't ever feel like I'm being an actor. — Adam Schlesinger

I had a job transcribing a biotechnology-litigation seminar. You put headphones on and fast-forward and stop with your feet. There were a lot of 'um's.' — Adam Schlesinger

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

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time. — Adam Schlesinger

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

I think ultimately what you really want is a few people within any label that are into the band enough to really work on it every day for a long time and to actually try a little bit. But obviously, the major labels have more money to spend, so if they feel like spending it, they have bigger resources there when you need them. It doesn't always necessarily translate into them doing a better job for a band, but I think especially if you're playing the game of commercial radio and making videos and stuff like that, that's sort of an expensive proposition. — Adam Schlesinger

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

Oh, the relationship with actors and managers and agents and things is a terrible problem sometimes. — John Schlesinger

I think in most cases, when you're writing a song, you're just making up a little story, and you're not really thinking about making a point one way or another about it. You're just coming up with a little scenario and seeing it through, and that's it. — Adam Schlesinger

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

Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle. — Garry Wills

I tend to write songs that are about something pretty specific. A lot of them tell some kind of little made-up story. — Adam Schlesinger

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.

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.

I like switching gears. I'm kind of a chameleon. — Adam Schlesinger

What should a song be about? It's a trick question for songwriters because lots of amazing songs aren't 'about' anything. Or, at least, they're not about anything that's obvious or logical. — Adam Schlesinger

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

With the TV stuff, we usually hand in final, finished tracks. The turnaround time is so tight that there's no time to demo anything; you just do it. — Adam Schlesinger

I'm just like anybody else: I have stuff to do in the day, whether that's writing a song or recording a song. I try to treat everything I do as just work. — Adam Schlesinger

A band can define their own success. — Adam Schlesinger

Stephen Schlesinger's Act of Creation tells a dazzling story of the dramatic events that have shaped the world in which we live. Never has a book been more relevant to present dangers and future hopes. — James Chace

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

In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases. — David Pietrusza

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