Top 64 Arthur Schlesinger Quotes
#1. I'm an idealist without illusions.
[Ca. 1953, attributed to John F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 'A Thousand Days'
John F. Kennedy
#2. I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.
Dennis Prager
#3. My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#4. Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He
John Updike
#5. Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.
Garry Wills
#6. I was at a book convention, in a cab. On one side of me was Arthur Schlesinger; on the other side was William Manchester - real heavyweights. All they were doing was asking me about Charles Manson. The only thing that enables me not to be bored is the people talking about it - they're so interested.
Vincent Bugliosi
#7. Truman makes friends without influencing people,' noted Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 'Dewey influences people without making friends.
David Pietrusza
#8. In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases.
David Pietrusza
#10. I don't think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#12. I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#13. Some people must dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#14. Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking,
Robert A. Caro
#15. The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#16. What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#18. 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.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#19. Leadership ignites the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#20. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values.
Arthur M. Schlesinger
#21. 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.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#22. There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#23. 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?
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#24. Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#25. 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 ...
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#26. 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.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#27. Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#28. Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
Arthur M. Schlesinger
#29. Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#30. Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#33. 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!
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#34. We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#39. Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#40. 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.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#43. 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.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#45. Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#46. The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#47. People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#50. The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#52. For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#54. The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#60. 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.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#61. These urban provinces, new to the American scene, possess greater economic, social, and cultural unity than most of the states. Yet, subdivided into separate municipalities...they face grave difficulties in meeting the essential needs of the aggregate population.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.
#63. 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
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
