Sam Tanenhaus > Quotes

“Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Literature Unbound

“In literature and in life we ultimately pursue, not conclusions, but beginnings.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Literature Unbound

“We all nurture impulses which promise freedom from the demands of others, even if that freedom means death.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Literature Unbound

“That image of a chessboard — an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy — has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones.”
― Sam Tanenhaus

“It is hardly a coincidence that the cadences of Chambers's HUAC testimony should anticipate the prose of Witness. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had given him his true voice...”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography

“legendary oilman Edward Doheny, both of whom were indicted shortly thereafter in a second oil deal, remembered today as Teapot”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“Community service was nearly a fetish for Pulling. “If we want to maintain the privileges we so richly enjoy as members of a free, democratic society,” he told his pupils, “we must be willing to shoulder the obligations they entail…. Responsibility cannot be learned only by hearing about it; one must actually experience it.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“What was true of Bill was equally true of all the Buckleys: they seemed able, and with no visible effort, to detach personal feeling from ideological passion.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“While Bill had been attacking his professors in the News and in speeches, his father had subsidized Crain’s new quarterly publication, The Educational Reviewer, which commissioned a panel of conservative professors to evaluate the textbooks being offered to educators who themselves lacked the expertise to ferret out anti-American heresies meant to “seduce our children into Socialism.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“Opposition is everyone’s right and a democracy cannot have too much of it. Although some of Lindbergh’s beliefs may be considered debatable he should be admired for his courage and sincerity.[”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“Nock’s purpose in pointing this out was not to defend the personal dignity of the poor. The poor did not interest him. His purpose was to expose the dangerous folly of social and political programs, which served only to make their beneficiaries slaves of centralizing power. Best for people to help themselves and their neighbors rather than pretending incurable social”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“Like so many libertarians, Nock was a Social Darwinist. His ideas owed much to Herbert Spencer’s writings on the “survival of the fittest.” The fittest did not include politicians, most of them—from presidents on down—tent-show charlatans, Rotary Club moralists, or pliable tools of secret interests.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“We have at Yale an intellectual collectivist atmosphere that pervades the campus,” Buckley told the Waldorf diners. His own teachers showed “extraordinary condescension towards those people whose thoughts are centered about certain definite Christian and classically liberal economic standards.” Aflame with “crusading” passion, enjoying the “glamour” of corrupting impressionable young minds, and with heavy doses of New Deal dogma, their purpose was revenge against a true free-market system in which they “[found] themselves on the short end of the economic stick, wondering why men of their capacities and achievements are not more appreciated by people of the United States. As a result of that [disappointment], they tend to condemn that system and they band together to decry the injustices of our social and economic order.” [8]”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“What was true at Yale was probably true elsewhere. Buckley’s book offered a “ ‘case’ study” of “the educational drift of modern times.[64]”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

“only his heir apparent Nixon, the dingy, shifty version of Ike who had almost been kicked off the ticket—twice. Remove him, and the field was open.”
― Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America