Henry Steele Commager
Henry Steele Commager
Henry Steele Commagerwas an American historian who helped define modern liberalism in the United States, for two generations, through his 40 books and 700 essays and reviews. His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s, which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s, and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth25 October 1902
CountryUnited States of America
Henry Steele Commager quotes about
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
We cannot have a society half slave and half free; nor can we have thought half slave and half free. If we create an atmosphere in which men fear to think independently, inquire fearlessly, express themselves freely, we will in the end create the kind of society in which men no longer care to think independently or to inquire fearlessly.
And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool.
We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt and that it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past. . .while we silence the rebels of the present.
It seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices changed sharply, and that though the standards of the nineteenth century persisted the institutions that had sustained them and the sanctions that had enforced them lost influence and authority.
Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.
We should not be surprised that the Founding Fathers didn't foresee everything, when we see that the current Fathers hardly ever foresee anything.
What every college must do is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness.
Its awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman.
The American people...have a stake in non-conformity. For they know that the American genius is non-conformist.
The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought.
The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma.
Our best people don't go into politics.
In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.