Best 51 quotes of Arthur M. Schlesinger on MyQuotes

Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.

Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.

Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

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).

Every President reconstructs the Presidency to meet his own psychological needs.

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!

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

Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

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.

History, in the end, becomes a form of irony.

History is full of surprises.

History is, indeed, an argument without end.

I don't think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise.

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.

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

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.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.

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.

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.

The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.

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.

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.

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

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

There is far less to the Presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye.

There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.

The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.

The very discovery of the New world was the by-product of a dietary quest.

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.

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.

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.'

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?

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

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.

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.

Some people must dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all.