Arthur M. Schlesinger
Arthur M. Schlesinger
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr.was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causesand downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors. He was highly influential as a director of PhD dissertations at Harvard for three decades, especially in the fields of social, women's, and immigration history. His son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., also both taught at Harvard and was a noted historian...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth27 February 1888
CountryUnited States of America
Arthur M. Schlesinger quotes about
For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.
All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.
To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man -- these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity. History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own.
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.
History is full of surprises.
The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.
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.