Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

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

History is full of surprises.

Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.

His peroration, no doubt

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

Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.

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.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy
also cheap,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but also where the

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.

Leadership ignites the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history.

Honest history is the weapon of freedom.

for an informed judgment

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

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

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

All wars are popular for the first 30 days.

Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.

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

The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.

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

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

History is, indeed, an argument without end.

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