Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. famous quotes

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

#History #Weapons #Honest

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

#Writing #Language #Clarity

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.

#America #Empathy #Apathy

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.

#War #World #Saving

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.

#Past #Remember #Aphorism

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.

#Next #Economics #Economist

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.

#Writing #Errors #Names

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

#Discovery #World #Quests

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.

#Frustration #Men #History

Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

#Dream #Memories #Revenge

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

#Doe #Anticipation #Trouble

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.

#Long #Libertarian #Socialism

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.

#Years #White #Long

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

#Educational #Democracy #Politician

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.

#Memories #Past #Knowing

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, Jr.

#Revenge #Consciousness #Habit

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.

#Deception #Needs #Irreverence

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.

#Hero #Men #Average

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

#Secret

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.

#People #Wish #President

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

#Eye #Essentials #Term

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

#President #Needs #Psychological

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.

#Father #Views #Republic

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

#War #Presidential #Democracy

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.

#Struggle #Important #Trying

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

#Passion #History #Disease

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

#Memories #History #Individual

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.

#Courage #Learning #Knowledge

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

#Mean #History #Use

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

#History #Argument #Ends

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.

#Religious #Children #Rights

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

#Memories #Technology #Tradition

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.

#People #Justice #Way

History is full of surprises.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

#Life #Surprise

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

#Retrospect #Ethics #Easy

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.

#Intellectual #Intuition #Excellence

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.

#Country #Government #Names

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

#Television #Habit #Reactions

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

#Long #Businessman #Anti Semitism

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

#Men #Office #Facts

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

#War #Firsts

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

#Self #Retrospect #Easy