The passion for tidiness is the historian’s occupational disease.
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.
Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.
The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.
I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.
Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.
History, in the end, becomes a form of irony.
I don’t think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.
Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values.
Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
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.
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.
There is far less to the Presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye.
What higher obligation does a President have than to explain his intentions to the people and persuade them that the direction he wishes to go is right?
Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.
Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.