Top 15 Henry Steele Commager Quotes

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

But if our democracy is to flourish it must have criticism, if our government is to function it must have dissent. Only totalitarian governments insist upon conformity and they—as we know—do so at their peril.

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.

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.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion,… In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you are going to penalize disloyalty, you must first determine what loyalty is; if you are going to silence nonconformity, you must determine what conformity is—and to what it conforms.

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…

If the preservation of our freedom depends upon the courts then we are, indeed, lost, for in the long run neither courts nor Constitution can save us from our own errors, follies, or wickedness.

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.