WIST

The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) Historian, author, social critic
“On Heroic Leadership,” Encounter (Dec 1960)

The present, as historians well know, re-creates the past. This is partly because, once we know how things have come out, we tend to rewrite the past in terms of historical inevitability.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) Historian, author, social critic
“The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus (Spring 1971)

By ideology I mean a body of systematic and rigid dogma by which people seek to understand the world — and to preserve or transform it.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) Historian, author, social critic
“The One Against the Many,” Paths to American Thought, ed. Schlesinger and Morton White (1963)

It is this belief in absolutes, I would hazard, that is the great enemy today of the life of the mind. This may seem a rash proposition. The fashion of the time is to denounce relativism as the root of all evil. But history suggests that the damage done to humanity by the relativist is far less than the damage done by the absolutist – by the fellow who, as Mr. Dooley once put it, ”does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if He only knew th’ facts in th’ case.”

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) Historian, author, social critic
“The Opening of the American Mind,” New York Times (23 Jul 1989)

Nations follow their historic interests rather more faithfully than they do their ideologies.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) Historian, author, social critic
The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941-1966, ch. 7 (1967)