Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. > Quotes

“Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap,”
― Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

“If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

“Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman," by which he meant that those at the top of the heap use intellectuals as a scapegoat to distract people from the societal inequities that actually affect their lives: those of wealth and power. Intellectuals are posited as both sinister and powerful, conspiratorially undermining the values of ordinary people.”
― Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

“This isn’t a matter for the eyes, it is a matter for the heart. Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory, they become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going. So a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. When I’m depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity, the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger

“Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.”
― Arthur Schlesinger

“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.”
― Arthur Schlessinger 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., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles Of American History: Updated Edition―A Political Historian's Reflection on Two Centuries of Pragmatism vs Idealism

“the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”
― Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

“As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

“The theory is that immersion in the history of one's own group will overcome feelings of racial inferiority both by instilling pride in past ethnic accomplishments and by providing ethnic role models to inspire future performance. Telling black children how marvelous old Africa was will make them work harder and do better. But does study of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome improve the academic record of Greek-American and Italian-American children? Not so that anyone has noticed. Why is it likely to help black children, who are removed from their geographical origins not by 50 years but by 300?”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The Irish were regarded as shiftless and drunken; moreover, they were papists, and their fealty to Rome, it was said, meant they could never become loyal Americans. They were subjected to severe discrimination in employment and were despised by genteel society. W.E.B. Du Bois, the black scholar, testified that when he grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the 1870s, "the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality?”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Instead of casting off the foreign skin, as John Quincy Adams had stipulated, never to resume it, the fashion is to resume the foreign skin as conspicuously as can be. The cult of ethnicity has reversed the movement of American history, producing a nation of minorities - or at least of minority spokesmen - less interested in joining with the majority in common endeavor than in declaring their alienation from oppressive, white, patriarchal, racist, sexist, classist society.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Today it is the Western democratic tradition that attracts and empowers people of all continents, creeds, and colors. When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Cuba’s history as an independent republic had been a drama of acute and chronic political frustration. One crowd after another had come to power on promises of progress and regeneration only to go out in orgies of graft and plunder. Dr. Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had presided”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

“In 1856 the Know-Nothings even ran a former president, Millard Fillmore, as their presidential candidate. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid", observed Abraham Lincoln. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal'. We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes'. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics'".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“When every ethnic and religious group claims a right to approve or veto anything that is taught in public schools, cultural pluralism becomes ethnocentrism. An evident casualty is the old idea that whatever our ethnic base, we are all Americans together.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“America gets the President it deserves”
― Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

“Multiculturalism" arises as a reaction against Anglo- or Eurocentrism; but at what point does it mutate into an ethnocentrism of its own?”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

“What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times

“The militants of ethnicity contend that a main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration, and perpetuation of ethnic origins and identities. Separatism, however, nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences, and stirs antagonisms. The consequent increase in ethnic and racial conflict lies behind the hullabaloo over "multiculturalism" and "political correctness", over the inequities of the "Eurocentric" curriculum, and over the notion that history and literature should be taught not as intellectual disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“[P]ressed too far, the cult of ethnicity has had bad consequences too. The new ethnic gospel rejects the unifying vision of individuals from all nations melted into a new race. Its underlying philosophy is that America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history.

Implicit in this philosophy is the classification of all Americans according to ethnic and racial criteria. But while the ethnic interpretation of American history, like economic interpretation, is valid and illuminating up to a point, it is fatally misleading and wrong when presented as a whole picture. The ethnic interpretation, moreover, reverses the historic theory of America as one people--the theory that has thus far managed to keep American society whole.

Instead of a transformative nation with an identity all its own, America in this new light is seen as preservative of diverse alien identities. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own unhampered choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less ineradicable in their ethnic character. The multiethnic dogma abandons historic purposes, replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separatism. It belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

“Leadership ignites the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

“Some people must dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

“We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency

“To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist—in his own phrase, a “utopian Socialist.” He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

“The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“[U]nless one is to yield to biological determinism and accept that the possession of black sin creates a unique black mentality and character, it is hard to see what living connection exists between American blacks today and their heterogeneous West African ancestors three centuries ago. And biological determinism--the theory that race determines mentality--is of course just another word for racism. Biological determinism is exactly the theory apologists for slavery used in the American South before the Civil War. It is bizarre to hear blacks invoking the same theory today.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society