Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Quotes

Honest history is the weapon of freedom.

The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

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.

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

History is, indeed, an argument without end.

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.

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.

Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.

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.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.

People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise.

There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.

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!

History is full of surprises.

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).

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.

In Defense of the World Order . . . U.S. soldiers would have to kill and die.

The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.

Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values.

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?

I don't think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.

History, in the end, becomes a form of irony.

Every President reconstructs the Presidency to meet his own psychological needs.

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.

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

The very discovery of the New world was the by-product of a dietary quest.

There is far less to the Presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.

Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.

Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.

Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.

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.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap.

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.

Some people must dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all.