All Rick Perlstein Quotes
- When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger. Armed
- It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex… Backlash
- 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… Alger
- No historical analogies are exactly precise. Analogies
- 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… All
- Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction,… Among
- 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… Abortion
- 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. Bill
- Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures… Always Judged
- Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. Computers
- Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions. Hell
- Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed. Blessed
- For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past. Conservatives
- 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… Corps
- 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… Anticommunist
- Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip. Business
- 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… American
- 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… American
- I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should - not least because he chose a career of public service when he could… American
- 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… American
- Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new Democrats for another… Another Seventy
- Part of the fantasy certain pro-reform Republicans like to broadcast about Hispanics, family-oriented, churchgoing traditionalists, is that they are somehow natural conservatives, just waiting for… American
- The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal… Belongs
- Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be - as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money… All
- Polling only works in a country without a depressed, frightened populace. Where the public trusts authorities enough to tell them the truth without fear of… Authorities