Henry Steele Commager quotes

Henry Steele Commager was an influential American historian and author, renowned for his writings on American history and democracy. His work helped shape public understanding of the nation’s past and the evolution of its values. He contributed significantly to public discourse through lectures, books, and essays. Here are 24 of his quotes:

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

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 discretion.

Henry Steele Commager

The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought.

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

Loyalty... is a realization that America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.

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 the past-Jefferson and Paine, Emerson and Thoreau-while we silence the rebels of the present.

Henry Steele Commager

Freedom in not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.

Henry Steele Commager

A nation that silences or intimidates original minds is left only with unoriginal minds and cannot hope to hold its own in the competition of peace or of war.

Henry Steele Commager

There are limits on liberty, as there are limits on authority. The broad principle of those limits is generally recognized and accepted; no liberties may be exercised so as to injure others or injure the community.

Henry Steele Commager

Who among American heroes could meet their tests, who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal and whose motto was "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips, who spoke for the underprivileged everywhere and counted himself a philosophical anarchist; not Seward of the Higher Law or Sumner of racial equality. Not Lincoln, who admonished us to have malice toward none, charity for all; or Wilson, who warned that our flag was "a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty"; or Justice Holmes, who said that our Constitution is an experiment and that while that experiment is being made "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death."

Henry Steele Commager

Uncertain of principles, we fall back on emotion; unfamiliar with the past, we are afraid of the future. Increasingly we look to men, ideas, and institutions not from the point of view of how they work, but from the point of view of how they ought to work...

Henry Steele Commager

The most effective censorship is not, in fact, legal; in a democracy-as Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America-it is public opinion.

Henry Steele Commager

By insisting upon conformity in the intellectual arena and by threatening with disapproval all those who dissent or who give us unpopular advice, we are in danger of following the totalitarian philosophy-and the totalitarian mistakes.

Henry Steele Commager

If government, or those in positions of power and authority, can silence criticism by the argument that such criticism might be misunderstood somewhere, there is an end to all criticism, and perhaps an end to our kind of political system. For men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

Henry Steele Commager

We must therefore look with grave misgivings upon the psychology of the ‘crusade' or on the notion that we can make the world over in our own image either by persuasion or by coercion.

Henry Steele Commager

This approach emphasizes what was once familiar enough to all Americans-and what we are now in danger of forgetting-that government derives its power from men; that rights of life and liberty are inalienable; that these rights are not something that government graciously confers upon men, but things no government can take away from men.

Henry Steele Commager

The American people have a stake in the maintenance of the most thorough-going inquisition into American institutions. They have a stake in nonconformity, for they know that the American genius is nonconformist.

Henry Steele Commager

We do not protect freedom in order to indulge error. We protect freedom in order to discover truth.

Henry Steele Commager

If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.

Henry Steele Commager

We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool.

Henry Steele Commager

The search for subversives results in the intimidation of the independent, the original, the imaginative, and the experimental-minded... It discourages the discussion of controversial matters in the classroom, for such discussion may be reported, or misreported, and cause trouble.

Henry Steele Commager