Rick Perlstein Quotes

39 quotes in 795 categories

• When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.
• It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex…
• Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he…
• No historical analogies are exactly precise.
• All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying…
• Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction,…
• Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on…
• Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out from under the thumb of corporate elites.
• Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures…
• Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.
• Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.
• Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.
• For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.
• Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in…
• Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population…
• Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.
• The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions…
• Unfortunately, given the rules of the American political game, people who try to participate by self-righteously refusing to identify with one or the other of…
• I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should - not least because he chose a career of public service when he could…
• It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses…

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