Rick Perlstein Quotes

#1. Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#3. Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

Rick Perlstein

#4. Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

Rick Perlstein

#5. The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God's name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel's 'miraculous' military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion's side.

Rick Perlstein

#6. In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line.

Rick Perlstein

#7. When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#9. In Ronald Reagan's 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.

Rick Perlstein

#10. He fetishized limits.

Rick Perlstein

#11. 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.

Rick Perlstein

#12. In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Rick Perlstein

#13. Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul).

Rick Perlstein

#14. I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

Rick Perlstein

#15. My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they'll say something like, 'Oh, didn't he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?' Well, that's just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos.

Rick Perlstein

#16. What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.

Rick Perlstein

#17. They made strategy at 33,000 feet (on) the campaign plane.

Rick Perlstein

#18. There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.

Rick Perlstein

#19. Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.

Rick Perlstein

#20. It wasn't hard to take a liberal stand on race so long as it was seen as a Southern problem, and the Republicans didn't have any white Southerners to placate.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#22. Conservatives felt victimized by a sort of radicalism that, because it graced Middle American classrooms, did not seem radical to most Americans at all.

Rick Perlstein

#23. In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#25. Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.

Rick Perlstein

#26. 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.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#28. That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

Rick Perlstein

#29. Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama's reelection.

Rick Perlstein

#30. One thing Republicans understand: In American elections, you have to choose from among only two people - not between the perfect and the good.

Rick Perlstein

#31. Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall.

Rick Perlstein

#32. Some days there were more police in schools than students. Rumors spread that armed black marauders would ride through their neighborhoods shooting whites at random; that blacks were carrying knives and razors to school to turn girls' rooms into rape rooms. So whites started carrying them first.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#34. Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

Rick Perlstein

#35. Do people still read before bed? I play 'Words With Friends.'

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#37. In Texas, the lies wore cowboy boots.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#39. It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.

Rick Perlstein

#40. Chits knew no ideology.

Rick Perlstein

#41. All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks.

Rick Perlstein

#42. Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President').

Rick Perlstein

#43. Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be - as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare. Meanwhile, some states have taken the money only to hoard it.

Rick Perlstein

#44. Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.

Rick Perlstein

#45. 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.

Rick Perlstein

#46. As a general rule of thumb, Democrats do better in national elections when the year's defining issue is economic fairness, and Republicans do better when the defining issue is national security.

Rick Perlstein

#47. My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats - in the optimistic hope that the dying embers of its status as the party of our better angels, one that took risks for social justice, can still be fanned into a flame. But I'm an old man, born in 1969.

Rick Perlstein

#48. For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.

Rick Perlstein

#49. When conservatives talk to one another, pay attention: they say what they want to do, and mean it. And will do just about anything to get there - even, or especially, claiming that they don't want to do the thing they want to do, until the time is ripe, and they can do it.

Rick Perlstein

#50. Polling only works in a country without a depressed, frightened populace. Where the public trusts authorities enough to tell them the truth without fear of retribution.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#52. There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are actually one and inseparable. It's a virtuous circle.

Rick Perlstein

#53. 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.

Rick Perlstein

#54. America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me.

Rick Perlstein

#55. Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party.

Rick Perlstein

#56. Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

Rick Perlstein

#57. I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should - not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace.

Rick Perlstein

#58. Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.

Rick Perlstein

#59. I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it.

Rick Perlstein

#60. Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant for the candy industry

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#62. Politics is motion." John Sears

Rick Perlstein

#63. Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.

Rick Perlstein

#64. I believe politics is a team sport. That, for awful and unfortunate reasons beyond any of our control, the American system only allows, effectively, for two teams.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#66. No historical analogies are exactly precise.

Rick Perlstein

#67. Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

Rick Perlstein

#68. Insistent opening bark of the UPI's Helen Thomas:

Rick Perlstein

#69. History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

Rick Perlstein

#70. Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.

Rick Perlstein

#71. While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#73. We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

Rick Perlstein

#74. Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out from under the thumb of corporate elites.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#76. Must, never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came the eleven times (from the departing Eisenhower). In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 with a cascade of permissions: the word "let" rang out 14 times.

Rick Perlstein

#77. I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.

Rick Perlstein

#78. Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.

Rick Perlstein

#79. Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.

Rick Perlstein

#80. Ideas in politics are often intuition fancy dress.

Rick Perlstein

#81. 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.

Rick Perlstein

#82. I think that all politicians who aspire to the presidency are a little nuts, but for different reasons. What kind of person aspires to be the most powerful person in the world? The answer is someone with an internal drive that is so dynamic and so determined.

Rick Perlstein

#83. Look at liberty's greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms - often putting their lives on the line - called themselves liberals.

Rick Perlstein

#84. For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly.

Rick Perlstein

#85. Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.

Rick Perlstein

#86. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Rick Perlstein

#87. Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new Democrats for another seventy-five years or so.

Rick Perlstein

#88. Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

Rick Perlstein

#89. Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.'

Rick Perlstein

#90. Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.

Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

#92. When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

Rick Perlstein

#93. When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.

Rick Perlstein

#94. The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the 'American War' upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone's 'JFK.'

Rick Perlstein

#95. There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum.

Rick Perlstein

#96. Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

Rick Perlstein

#97. Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

Rick Perlstein

#98. There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that's the health of the nation.

Rick Perlstein

#99. 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.

Rick Perlstein

#100. I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

Rick Perlstein