Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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.
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.
Only a cad tells the truth about his love affairs.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The object of liberalism has never been to destroy capitalism … only to keep the capitalists from destroying it.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Above all he [John F. Kennedy] gave the world for an imperishable moment the vision of a leader who greatly understood the terror and the hope, the diversity and the possibility, of life on this planet and who made people look beyond nation and race to the future of humanity.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic; Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The answer to the runaway Presidency is not the messenger-boy Presidency. The American democracy must discover a middle ground between making the President a czar and making him a puppet.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The great appeal of fatalism … is as a refuge from the terror of responsibility.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The purpose of democratic statecraft is, or should be, to find the means of ordered liberty in a world condemned to everlasting change.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women's history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Ceremony, circus, farce, melodrama, tragedy…nothing else offers all at once the whirl, the excitement, the gaiety, the intrigue, and the anguish.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
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.
The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Suppose…that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in 1895 and Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916. What would the twentieth century have looked like now?

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The constitutional Presidency—as events so apparently disparate as the Indochina War and the Watergate affair showed—has become the imperial Presidency.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The choice we face is not between progress with conflict and progress without conflict. The choice is between conflict and stagnation. … The totalitarians regard the toleration of conflict as our central weakness. So it may appear in an age of anxiety. But we know it to be basically our central strength.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.