Henry Steele Commager
Henry Steele Commager
Henry Steele Commagerwas an American historian who helped define modern liberalism in the United States, for two generations, through his 40 books and 700 essays and reviews. His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s, which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s, and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth25 October 1902
CountryUnited States of America
Henry Steele Commager quotes about
Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.
A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.
The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.
Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.
It is sobering to recall that though the Japanese relocation program, carried through at such incalculable cost in misery and tragedy, was justified on the ground that the Japanese were potentially disloyal, the record does not disclose a single case of Japanese disloyalty or sabotage during the whole war…
It is probably safe to say that over a long period of time, political morality has been as high as business morality.
If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.
History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.
The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought.
We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt and that it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past. . .while we silence the rebels of the present.