Arthur M. Schlesinger
Arthur M. Schlesinger
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr.was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causesand downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors. He was highly influential as a director of PhD dissertations at Harvard for three decades, especially in the fields of social, women's, and immigration history. His son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., also both taught at Harvard and was a noted historian...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth27 February 1888
CountryUnited States of America
Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.
To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man -- these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity. History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own.
The military struggle may frankly be regarded for what it actually was, namely a war for independence, an armed attempt to imposethe views of the revolutionists upon the British government and large sections of the colonial population at whatever cost to freedom of opinion or the sanctity of life and property.
People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise.
Every President reconstructs the Presidency to meet his own psychological needs.
In Defense of the World Order . . . U.S. soldiers would have to kill and die.
History, in the end, becomes a form of irony.
Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.
Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap,
The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.
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...
The only President who clearly died of overwork was Polk, and that was a long time ago. Hoover, who worked intensely and humorlessly as President, lived for more than thirty years after the White House; Truman, who worked intensely and gaily, lived for twenty
Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
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!