The Imperial Presidency Quotes

“We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency

“A further reason for the indestructibility of the Presidency lies in the psychology of mass democracy. Once again Tocqueville provides the text. “Our contemporaries,” he wrote, “are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free....By this system the people shake off their state of dependency just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency

“The Court, in its zeal to rebuke the Presidency, almost reversed Lincoln’s analogy about giving a limb to save a life: “A country preserved at the sacrifice of all the cardinal principles of liberty, is not worth the cost of preserving.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency

“The single-man Presidency, with the right man as President, had its uses; and historically Americans had as often as not chosen the right man.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency

“Discussions around the President, Reedy concluded, were “really monologues in which one man is getting reflections of what he sends out.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency