Alan Brinkley quotes

Alan Brinkley quotes

last updated: November 28, 2023

“For at least the past 65 years, liberalism has been nothing if not an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals, between the need for freedom and the need for order.”
-- Alan Brinkley

#Past Quotes #Order Quotes #Years Quotes

“Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.”
“In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.”
“The experience youâ€™ve had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it.”
“I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.”
“The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.”
“That was interesting." "He deliberately countermanded one of my orders." "He was furtive." "Sneaky, even." "We'll make a Rebellion-style pilot of him yet." Tycho & Wedge (about Jag)”
“The search for safety takes its clearest form... in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis... to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.”
“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.”
“One of the penalties of being president of the United States is that you must subsist for four years without drinking anything except Californian wine.”

Source : Christopher Morley (1920). “Hide and Seek”
“Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without”

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