Carl L. Becker Quotes

#1. Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed.

Carl L. Becker

#2. To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.

Carl L. Becker

#3. History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

Carl L. Becker

#4. All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Carl L. Becker

#5. Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.

Carl L. Becker

#6. The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

Carl L. Becker

#7. No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected ... to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

Carl L. Becker

#8. History is the memory of things said and done.

Carl L. Becker

#9. Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept

Carl L. Becker