Quotes from Rick Perlstein

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another—until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Being hated by the right people was no impediment to success. The unpolished were everywhere the majority.

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Goldwater was, in other words, a candidate for voters in Boston as much as those in Birmingham—catering to white voters who were against the idea of federal civil rights legislation but at the same time desperate to receive assurances that this didn't make them bad people.

Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place.

Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.

The best measure of a politician's electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people's desires, but how well he could tap their fears.

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less;

Scranton describing Sen. Robert A. Taft's conservatism as compared to Goldwater's said Taft was a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all the human values that have been carried down to us on a long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed.

To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.

A pro–civil rights columnist for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger noted the familiar faces from his reporting on White Citizens Council meetings back in the 1950s and '60s. Only one thing was different: "Their enemy now is not the black man but 'liberalism,' in any form, as they see it.

Conservatives felt victimized by a sort of radicalism that, because it graced Middle American classrooms, did not seem radical to most Americans at all.

Besides, he knew something that Chuck Percy, ABC News, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and even the President of the United States did not know: a new conservative-movement political machine was humming just beneath the Establishment's radar in North Carolina, ready to rewire what people thought they knew about how American politics worked. THE

Some days there were more police in schools than students. Rumors spread that armed black marauders would ride through their neighborhoods shooting whites at random; that blacks were carrying knives and razors to school to turn girls' rooms into rape rooms. So whites started carrying them first.

Heroes can only thrive where ignorance reduces history to mythology. They. cannot survive the coldly critical temper of modern thought when it is functioning normally, nor can they be worshipped by a generation which has every facility for determining their foibles and analyzing their limitations.

This trip was not about running for president. This trip was preparing to BE president.

Jimmy Carter's pollster Pat Caddell understood how dangerous all this could prove to the Democratic coalition: blue-collar voters were vulnerable to conservative appeals because they were "no longer solely motivated by economic concerns—which have traditionally made them Democrats." Now that they feared "change in society" more than losing their place in the middle class, they were "one of the most vulnerable groups in the Democratic coalition.

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew

He talks to people's grievances, but he doesn't seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew

Why was Barack Obama attractive to people in 2008? If you think about Barack Obama, there's all this anxiety about society, just kind of wracked by centripetal forces - the idea that the center's not holding, no one can talk to each other, the idea of a political system that's broken.