Historical Quotes
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I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
I think that all politicians who aspire to the presidency are a little nuts, but for different reasons. What kind of person aspires to be the most powerful person in the world? The answer is someone with an internal drive that is so dynamic and so determined.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President').
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Why was Barack Obama attractive to people in 2008? If you think about Barack Obama, there's all this anxiety about society, just kind of wracked by centripetal forces - the idea that the center's not holding, no one can talk to each other, the idea of a political system that's broken.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
I believe politics is a team sport. That, for awful and unfortunate reasons beyond any of our control, the American system only allows, effectively, for two teams.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new Democrats for another seventy-five years or so.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
In Ronald Reagan's case, he always bore with him this extraordinary ability to radiate confidence, optimism, clarity, a blitheness of spirit, in what other people saw as chaos. And after the 1970s, that was catnip.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
It's almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around cultural fears, Republicans win the election.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out from under the thumb of corporate elites.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
One of the most important things liberals don't understand about conservatism, obscured by too much lazy talk about conservatism's various 'wings,' is that its tenets form a relatively organic base for its adherents, where 'traditional morality' serves the interests of laissez-faire economics and vice-versa.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul).
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
When conservatives talk to one another, pay attention: they say what they want to do, and mean it. And will do just about anything to get there - even, or especially, claiming that they don't want to do the thing they want to do, until the time is ripe, and they can do it.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
I love trade magazines - any trade's magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own, you better recognize the vastness of the social universe - for there are so, so many worlds that are not your own.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures - means - is the core of what being 'principled' means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome - ends - even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being 'principled' means.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be - as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare. Meanwhile, some states have taken the money only to hoard it.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Polling only works in a country without a depressed, frightened populace. Where the public trusts authorities enough to tell them the truth without fear of retribution.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are actually one and inseparable. It's a virtuous circle.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Look at liberty's greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms - often putting their lives on the line - called themselves liberals.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
As a general rule of thumb, Democrats do better in national elections when the year's defining issue is economic fairness, and Republicans do better when the defining issue is national security.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein