Gertrude Himmelfarb Quotes

#1. Nothing is as seductive as the assurance of success.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#2. Absolute liberty ... tends to corrupt absolutely.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#3. The real movement of history, it turns out, is fueled not by matter but by spirit, by the will to freedom.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#4. For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#5. In its sentimental mode, compassion is an exercise in moral indignation, in feeling good rather than doing good ... In its unsentimental mode, compassion seeks above all to do good ...

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#6. Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#7. The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a work of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to the validity of the work, the integrity (and the humility) of the historian, and to the dignity of the discipline.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#8. The present illegitimacy ratio is not only unprecedented in the past two centuries; it is unprecedented, so far as we know, in American history going back to colonial times, and in English history from Tudor times.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#9. Without will, without individuals, there are no heroes. But neither are there villains. And the absence of villains is as prostrating, as soul-destroying, as the absence of heroes.

Gertrude Himmelfarb