Henry Steele Commager famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Education #Essentials #Want
A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Ideas #Eccentric #Cherish
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

#Men #Thinking #Patriotism
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

#Real #Exercise #Purpose
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Inspirational #Progress #Doe
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

#Mean #Rights #Government
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

#Religious #Eye #Decision
The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Atheism #Constitution #Framed
The American people...have a stake in non-conformity. For they know that the American genius is non-conformist.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#People #Genius #Conformity
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

#Luxury #Enlightenment #Liberty
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

#Art #Philosophy #Flower
The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Absence #Danger #Orthodox
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

#Ignorance #Good Man #Privacy
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

#Order #History #Surprise
Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Government #Effort #Patterns
It is sobering to recall that though the Japanese relocation program, carried through at such incalculable cost in misery and tragedy, was justified on the ground that the Japanese were potentially disloyal, the record does not disclose a single case of Japanese disloyalty or sabotage during the whole warâ€¦
-- Henry Steele Commager

#War #Tragedy #Doe
It is probably safe to say that over a long period of time, political morality has been as high as business morality.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Long #Political #Safe
If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Government #Democracy #Criticism
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

#Errors #Mind #Freedom Of Speech
America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#America #Liberty #Born
Its awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Crazy #Son #Men
And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Philosophy #Believe #People
We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt and that it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past. . .while we silence the rebels of the present.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#War #Past #Silence
The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought.
-- Henry Steele Commager

#Faces #Kind #Absence

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