Quotes from Rick Perlstein

What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.

No historical analogies are exactly precise.

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

I think that all politicians who aspire to the presidency are a little nuts, but for different reasons. What kind of person aspires to be the most powerful person in the world? The answer is someone with an internal drive that is so dynamic and so determined.

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

It was called A Ford, Not a Lincoln, and in it, Richard Reeves described him as "slow, plodding, pedestrian, unimaginative," "inarticulate," and "ignorant"—though you didn't have to take Reeves's word for it. He also quoted the president's Grand Rapids pastor: "Gerald Ford is a normal, decent, God-fearing man, but you can say that about a lot of people.

Ideas" in politics are often intuition fancy dress.

America had not yet become Reagan's America. Not yet. Reagan's America would embrace an almost official cult of optimism—the belief that America could do no wrong. Or, to put it another way, that if America did it, it was by definition not wrong. That would come later. But signs were already pointing in that direction.

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by to-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.

Milk and his allies wanted their movement to signify hope. So he approached a friend, the graphic designer Gilbert Baker, who suggested a rainbow instead. "A rainbow fit us," said the man who became famous as the "gay Betsy Ross." "It is from nature. It connects us to all the colors—all the colors of sexuality, all the diversity in our community.

But if you admit to not having the answer to any of the problems facing the nation, why should anyone vote of your for President?" "I believe I am the best qualified to wing it." But

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

Irving Kristol, for his part, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, like a right-wing Joseph Stalin, that the political advantage tax cuts would provide Republicans was so historically imperative that they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget. "The neoconservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards": now was no time to go wobbly.

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.

Haldeman exposed the other side of the Silent Majority rhetorical coin: it welcomed division. It welcomed hate. For if the world was divided between good and evil, hating evil was the appropriate response. And what violations of procedural nicety weren't permissible in order to vanquish evil?

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

He concluded, "While there may have been extremist groups who grasped the opportunity to exploit the violence…to state that the riots were Communist or otherwise inspired appears to me to be a lame excuse to salve the consciences of those who do not want to, or refuse to, face the conditions that precipitated this disaster and similar ones in other great cities of our nation: rat-infested slums, unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, frustration, and despair.

The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.

They made strategy at 33,000 feet (on) the campaign plane.

Some in his community were suspicious, too—how convenient that people always managed to almost drown themselves whenever young Reagan was around, and how annoying that he never seemed to shut up about it.