Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Quotes

Instead of casting off the foreign skin, as John Quincy Adams had stipulated, never to resume it, the fashion is to resume the foreign skin as conspicuously as can be. The cult of ethnicity has reversed the movement of American history, producing a nation of minorities - or at least of minority spokesmen - less interested in joining with the majority in common endeavor than in declaring their alienation from oppressive, white, patriarchal, racist, sexist, classist society.

Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.

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!

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

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

In 1856 the Know-Nothings even ran a former president, Millard Fillmore, as their presidential candidate. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid", observed Abraham Lincoln. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal'. We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes'. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics'".

Yet I believe the campaign against the idea of common ideals and a single society will fail. Gunnar Myrdal was surely right: for all the damage it has done, the upsurge of ethnicity is a superficial enthusiasm stirred by romantic ideologues and unscrupulous hucksters whose claim to speak for their minorities is thoughtlessly accepted by the media.

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 ...

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 Irish were regarded as shiftless and drunken; moreover, they were papists, and their fealty to Rome, it was said, meant they could never become loyal Americans. They were subjected to severe discrimination in employment and were despised by genteel society. W.E.B. Du Bois, the black scholar, testified that when he grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the 1870s, "the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me".

Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.

The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.

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

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.

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.

When every ethnic and religious group claims a right to approve or veto anything that is taught in public schools, cultural pluralism becomes ethnocentrism. An evident casualty is the old idea that whatever our ethnic base, we are all Americans together.

Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women's history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible.

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?

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

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.

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

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

To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist - in his own phrase, a "utopian Socialist." He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370.

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.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy
also cheap,

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

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

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.

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

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

Today it is the Western democratic tradition that attracts and empowers people of all continents, creeds, and colors. When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty.

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.

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.

History is full of surprises.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Certainly the European overlords did little enough to prepare Africa for self-government but Democracy would find it hard in any case to put down roots in a tribalist and patrimonial culture that long before the west invaded Africa had sacralized the personal authority of chieftains and ordained the submission of the rest. What the west would call corruption is regarded through much of Africa as no more than the prerogative of power.

Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.

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

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

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

The issue is the ethnocentric history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. Cn any historian justify the proposition that the five ethnic communities into which the New York state task force wishes to divide the country had equal influence on the development of the United States? Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality?