Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Some people must dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all.

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide.

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.

The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.