List of Henry Steele Commager Quotes

It Seems Fair To Say That While The Moral Standards Of The Nineteenth Century Persisted Almost Unchanged Into The Twentieth, Moral Practices Changed Sharply, And That Though The Standards Of The Nineteenth Century Persisted The Institutions That Had Sustained Them And The Sanctions That Had Enforced Them Lost Influence And Authority.

The American People...have A Stake In Non-conformity. For They Know That The American Genius Is Non-conformist.

What Every College Must Do Is Hold Up Before The Young The Spectacle Of Greatness.

Its Awfully Hard To Be The Son Of A Great Man And Also Of A Half-crazy Woman.

And We Wonder What Can Be That 'philosophy Of Education' Which Believes That Young People Can Be Trained To The Duties Of Citizenship By Wrapping Their Minds In Cotton Wool.

History Is A Jangle Of Accidents, Blunders, Surprises And Absurdities, And So Is Our Knowledge Of It, But If We Are To Report It At All We Must Impose Some Order Upon It.

It Is Probably Safe To Say That Over A Long Period Of Time, Political Morality Has Been As High As Business Morality.

The Greatest Danger We Face Is Not Any Particular Kind Of Thought. The Greatest Danger We Face Is Absence Of Thought.

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.

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.

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.