Best 52 quotes of Rick Perlstein on MyQuotes

I cant summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tatis Play Time. You just have to see it.

Imagine a senator running for president whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations - and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. That was Barry Goldwater, conservative.

In Ronald Reagans case, he always bore with him this extraordinary ability to radiate confidence, optimism, clarity, a blitheness of spirit, in what other people saw as chaos. And after the 1970s, that was catnip.

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.

Ive summarized dozens of books in my literary career; its become rather second nature.

No historical analogies are exactly precise.

Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.

When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.

Chits knew no ideology.

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

Congressmen had a use for their very own son of a bitch.

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.

God might choose his own time, but Reagan had a taste for coming to the rescue.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

He fetishized limits.

He (Nixon) needed someone with him so he could be alone.

He talks to people's grievances, but he doesn't seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew

Ideas" in politics are often intuition fancy dress.

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.

Now even reformers needed political machines.

One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was.

People did what conservatives always did when the going got tough: they started a new group.

Perlstein says a movement gives you a chance, "to make anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering.

Politics is motion." John Sears

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.

Scranton describing Sen. Robert A. Taft's conservatism as compared to Goldwater's said Taft was "a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all the human values that have been carried down to us on a long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

The best measure of a politician’s electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people’s desires, but how well he could tap their fears.

The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.

The ideal politician is an ordinary representative of his class with extraordinary abilities.

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.

To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.