Quotes from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.

Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.

Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.

Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.

Honest history is the weapon of freedom.

History is, indeed, an argument without end.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders.

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.

Excellence is the eternal quest. We achieve it by living up to our highest intellectual standards and our finest moral intuitions. In seeking excellence, take life seriously-but never yourself!

History is full of surprises.

I don't think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

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.

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.

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.

Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue.

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).