Top 100 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. Twelve-year-olds are eager to turn everything into arguments but don't have the cognitive skills to win them.
Linda Perlstein
#12. 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
#13. Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.
Rick Perlstein
#14. In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.
Rick Perlstein
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.
Rick Perlstein
#19. My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.
Rick Perlstein
#20. They made strategy at 33,000 feet (on) the campaign plane.
Rick Perlstein
#21. For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.
Rick Perlstein
#22. There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.
Rick Perlstein
#23. Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That's me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free).
Rick Perlstein
#24. 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
#25. People did what conservatives always did when the going got tough: they started a new group.
Rick Perlstein
#26. 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
#27. A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.
Rick Perlstein
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.
Rick Perlstein
#31. God might choose his own time, but Reagan had a taste for coming to the rescue.
Rick Perlstein
#32. Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.
Rick Perlstein
#33. Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.
Rick Perlstein
#34. Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.
Rick Perlstein
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.
Rick Perlstein
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. But if you admit to not having the answer to any of the problems facing the nation, why should anyone vote of your for President?" "I believe I am the best qualified to wing it." But
Rick Perlstein
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.
Rick Perlstein
#45. Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?
Rick Perlstein
#46. Do people still read before bed? I play 'Words With Friends.'
Rick Perlstein
#47. They campaigned on contempt for the body they sought to join.
Rick Perlstein
#48. (President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.
Rick Perlstein
#50. Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.
Rick Perlstein
#51. 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
#53. He (Nixon) needed someone with him so he could be alone.
Rick Perlstein
#54. What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?
Rick Perlstein
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.
Rick Perlstein
#59. Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.
Rick Perlstein
#60. 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
#61. The best measure of a politician's electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people's desires, but how well he could tap their fears.
Rick Perlstein
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.
Rick Perlstein
#65. 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
#66. Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.
Rick Perlstein
#67. In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.
Rick Perlstein
#68. What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers - to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?
Rick Perlstein
#69. For a long time, I was trapped in this struggle with my emotions about the single person in the world who was my family.
Hanna Perlstein Marcus
#70. 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
#71. It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.
Rick Perlstein
#72. Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.
Rick Perlstein
#73. Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.
Rick Perlstein
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).
Rick Perlstein
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.
Rick Perlstein
#80. 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
#81. I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.
Rick Perlstein
#82. Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.
Rick Perlstein
#83. I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it.
Rick Perlstein
#84. Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant for the candy industry
Rick Perlstein
#85. The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.
Rick Perlstein
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.
Rick Perlstein
#90. This trip was not about running for president. This trip was preparing to BE president.
Rick Perlstein
#91. Two hundred thousand Americans sent in their WIN enlistment forms. Now that the campaign season was upon us, a reeling Republican Party had something to sell: collective obligation, in the key of homespun earnestness.
Rick Perlstein
#95. 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
#96. Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.
Rick Perlstein
#97. Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.
Rick Perlstein
#99. For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures - means - is the core of what being 'principled' means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome - ends - even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being 'principled' means.
Rick Perlstein
#100. 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
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