Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is far less to the Presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye.
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Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
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History is, indeed, an argument without end.
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The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.
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The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.
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All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
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Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.
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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).
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I don't think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.
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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.
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In Defense of the World Order . . . U.S. soldiers would have to kill and die.
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Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
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Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap.
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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.
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The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
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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.
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Righteousness is easy in retrospect.
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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!
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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.
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Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
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Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.
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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
- Born: October 15, 1917
- Died: February 28, 2007
- Occupation: Historian
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