Quotes from Louis Menand

You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.

gradualism in theory, is perpetuity in practice.

good & universal (or general law) are synonymous terms in the universe.…

The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in education.

He defended them because he believed that every social interest should have its chance.

When you know that you know persecution comes easy.

When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, on January 1, 1863, Abbott wrote from the front to his aunt to explain that "[t]he president's proclamation is of course received with universal disgust, particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan't see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the constitution.

He believed that "a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties. The public sentiment, then, or law, … will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections."31

I think you are hopeful because (excuse me) you are ignorant.

Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln's firing of McClellan, who, despite his poor showing in the field, was widely respected as a military professional. These are the views reflected in Holmes's letter. They were Copperhead views, but one did not need to be a Democrat in the fall of 1862 to share them.

confused begging of some philosophical question

Abbott had also impressed on Holmes, possibly by his conversation but certainly by his example, the belief that nobility of character consists in doing one's job with indifference to ends

Holmes never mentions Abbott again in any of the war correspondence or the diaries that survive.

organized study deadens the mind, and that genuine insight arises spontaneously from the individual soul.

In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.

when we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are.

Certitude leads to violence.

that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

active habit involving an exertion of will.

All that can be expected from modern improvements is that legislation should easily and quickly, yet not too quickly, modify itself in accordance with the will of the de facto supreme power in the community

successful people, like Morgan and Rockefeller, just had a better grasp of social tendencies than unsuccessful people

On the contrary: she thought that the conditions that had made Hitler possible were still present, and that the West needed to be reborn. The European tradition had destroyed itself. "The whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization with all its implied beliefs, traditions, and standards of judgment has come toppling down over our heads," she wrote.47

The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence.

The mob was made up of the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were embodiments of the politics of resentment. Arendt thought that the leadership of totalitarian movements came from this group.