Henry Steele Commager Quotes

Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.

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.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.

We cannot have a society half slave and half free; nor can we have thought half slave and half free. If we create an atmosphere in which men fear to think independently, inquire fearlessly, express themselves freely, we will in the end create the kind of society in which men no longer care to think independently or to inquire fearlessly.

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.

History is organized memory, and the organization is all important!

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.

The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them.

Whether history will judge this war to be different or not we cannot say. But this we can say with certainty: A government and a society that silences those who dissent is one that has lost its way.

We should not be surprised that the Founding Fathers didn't foresee everything, when we see that the current Fathers hardly ever foresee anything.

Our best people don't go into politics.

In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma.

Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.

The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought.

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.

America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it - as with these - life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.

We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past ... while we silence the rebels of the present.

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.

To yearn for a single, and usually simple, explanation of the chaotic materials of the past, to search for a single thread in that most tangled of all skeins, is a sign of immaturity.

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.