Chester Alan Arthur Quotes

“At the time, few Americans gave much thought to preserving legacies for history. The new was worshipped, the old usually cast aside. To the dismay of archivists and preservationists, the White House of the nineteenth century was a revolving door of styles and motifs, and successive occupants discarded past desiderata with little consideration for the desires of future generations for artifacts.”
― Zachary Karabell, Chester Alan Arthur: The American Presidents Series: The 21st President, 1881-1885

“No one described the mix of sublime and mundane better than the Republican senator from Kansas, John Ingalls. In an era when man’s conquest of nature was proceeding in an uninterrupted stampede, when the wonders of evolution and the fate of dinosaurs were occupying the salon dreams of the educated and the elite, Ingalls let loose a rhetorical fancy that almost flew away from him in a flurry of flowery verbiage. Government circa 1880, he remarked, “can properly be regarded as in the transition epoch and characterized as a pterodactyl.… It is, like that animal, equally adapted to the waddling and dabbling in the slime and mud of partisan politics, and soaring aloft with discordant cries into the glittering and opalescent empyrean of civil service reform.”
― Zachary Karabell, Chester Alan Arthur: The American Presidents Series: The 21st President, 1881-1885