Rick Perlstein Quotes

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  • Historian
  • born 1969
  • 100 quotes

Rick Perlstein, a historian (born 1969), is quoted 100 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Democrats, Team Sport, Liberals and Thumb.

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I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

No historical analogies are exactly precise.

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.

Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

I cant summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tatis Play Time. You just have to see it.

Ive summarized dozens of books in my literary career; its become rather second nature.

I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.

I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it.

What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.

In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.

Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.

For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.

Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

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.

When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.

One thing Republicans understand: In American elections, you have to choose from among only two people - not between the perfect and the good.

Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.

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 1972.

When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

I believe politics is a team sport. That, for awful and unfortunate reasons beyond any of our control, the American system only allows, effectively, for two teams.

Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

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 retribution.

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 the Mall.

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 seventy-five years or so.

Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.

There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are actually one and inseparable. It's a virtuous circle.

While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price.

For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly.

I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.

My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.

As a general rule of thumb, Democrats do better in national elections when the year's defining issue is economic fairness, and Republicans do better when the defining issue is national security.

There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that's the health of the nation.

The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the 'American War' upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone's 'JFK.'

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers - to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?

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 that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.

In Ronald Reagans case, he always bore with him this extraordinary ability to radiate confidence, optimism, clarity, a blitheness of spirit, in what other people saw as chaos. And after the 1970s, that was catnip.

In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all.

In Ronald Reagan's case, he always bore with him this extraordinary ability to radiate confidence, optimism, clarity, a blitheness of spirit, in what other people saw as chaos. And after the 1970s, that was catnip.

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 to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.

Rick Perlstein is quoted on

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