Henry Steele Commager

It's awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman.

— Henry Steele Commager

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

— Henry Steele Commager

The American people...have a stake in non-conformity. For they know that the American genius is non-conformist.

— Henry Steele Commager

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

— Henry Steele Commager

We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of…

— Henry Steele Commager

The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is…

— Henry Steele Commager

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

— Henry Steele Commager

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is…

— Henry Steele Commager

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

— Henry Steele Commager

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

— Henry Steele Commager

It seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices…

— Henry Steele Commager

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

— Henry Steele Commager

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful.…

— Henry Steele Commager

Whether history will judge this war to be different or not we cannot say. But this we can say with certainty: A…

— Henry Steele Commager

We cannot have a society half slave and half free; nor can we have thought half slave and half free. If we…

— Henry Steele Commager

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to…

— Henry Steele Commager

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

— Henry Steele Commager

The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought.

— Henry Steele Commager

Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is,…

— Henry Steele Commager

Its awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman.

— Henry Steele Commager

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world…

— Henry Steele Commager

Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is…

— Henry Steele Commager

The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon…

— Henry Steele Commager

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.

— Henry Steele Commager

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real…

— Henry Steele Commager