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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.

Henry Steele Commager

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Henry Steele Commager
Age: 95 †
Born: 1902
Born: October 25
Died: 1998
Died: March 2
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Usually
Yearn
Single
Tangled
Simple
Chaotic
Past
Thread
Explanation
Search
Sign
Materials
Immaturity

More quotes by Henry Steele Commager

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If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism if our government is to function it must have dissent.
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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.
Henry Steele Commager
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A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.
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The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.
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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.
Henry Steele Commager
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Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
Henry Steele Commager
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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.
Henry Steele Commager
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What every college must do is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness.
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Our best people don't go into politics.
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Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.
Henry Steele Commager
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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.
Henry Steele Commager
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History is organized memory, and the organization is all important!
Henry Steele Commager
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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.
Henry Steele Commager
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Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.
Henry Steele Commager
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America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.
Henry Steele Commager
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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.
Henry Steele Commager
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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.
Henry Steele Commager
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The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought.
Henry Steele Commager
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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.
Henry Steele Commager