Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.
For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible “mixed economy,” thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.
The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.
The passion for tidiness is the historian’s occupational disease.
Santayana’s aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.
All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.
The very discovery of the New world was the by-product of a dietary quest.
Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.
History is full of surprises.
Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.
Righteousness is easy in retrospect.
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!
There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.
Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.
The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.