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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Robert Dallek Quotes

The Bay of Pigs is one of America’s most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since.

– Robert Dallek

The 1890s was an intensely patriotic decade for Americans. It was a time of neo-imperialism, when the European powers and the United States were establishing their flags around the globe.

– Robert Dallek

Few American presidents are held in higher esteem than Thomas Jefferson. Though historians have scrutinized every phase of his long public career and found him wanting in a number of respects, he holds an unshakable place in the pantheon of American heroes.

– Robert Dallek

I think experience is a terribly overrated idea when it comes to thinking about who should become president.

– Robert Dallek

There are examples of ex-presidents speaking out. Jimmy Carter has not held back on a variety of issues. Harry Truman didn’t.

– Robert Dallek

How many State of the Union addresses do people remember? They don’t resonate that way.

– Robert Dallek

William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties.

– Robert Dallek

Besieged by lawsuits that threatened to engulf almost everyone at the White House, Clinton assistants shunned paper or e-mail records of their daily deliberations. One told me that he would go down the hall to confer with his division chief face to face rather than discuss an issue on the telephone.

– Robert Dallek

Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama’s willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

– Robert Dallek

To be sure, Kennedy did not discount the importance of words in rallying the nation to meet its foreign and domestic challenges. Winston Churchill’s powerful exhortations during World War II set a standard he had long admired. Kennedy was hardly unmindful of how important a great inaugural address could be.

– Robert Dallek

Ronald Reagan in foreign affairs, I think, was someone who had certain, very general ideas, general propositions by which he lives: To combat communism, to build up the American military power to assure our national security against any conceivable threat.

– Robert Dallek

If nobody trusts you as president, then you can’t get anything done.

– Robert Dallek

Full federal funding for presidential libraries should bring with it new rules of control over papers and artifacts.

– Robert Dallek

For style and for creating a mood of optimism and hope – Kennedy on that count is as effective as any president the country has had in its history.

– Robert Dallek

Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver.

– Robert Dallek

Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society launched an anti-Communist crusade that won the support of millions of Americans in the 1950s.

– Robert Dallek

There is a line between scurrilous nonsense and serious discussion that laps over, especially in this day and age when you’ve got all this electronic media and these blogs and this kind of fanatical impulse to bring down the opposing candidate.

– Robert Dallek

What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression.

– Robert Dallek

McCarthy had ten years in the House of Representatives, only two terms as a senator. What did he pass? Are there any bills or any piece of legislation that he’s identified with? Not at all.

– Robert Dallek

Once the public loses confidence in a president’s leadership at a time of war, once they don’t trust him anymore, once his credibility is sharply diminished, how does he get it back?

– Robert Dallek

True, most Americans give lip service to the proposition that even the most exalted among us have their flaws, but we are eager to believe that presidents manage to rise above the limitations that beset the rest of us.

– Robert Dallek

Congress becomes the public voice of opposition.

– Robert Dallek

A president cannot sit on his hands and be seen as passive in the face of ruthless action by a foreign dictator.

– Robert Dallek

President Obama can talk about having no grand schemes and making no big gains, but the reality is he can’t get anything of significance through Congress.

– Robert Dallek

The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.

– Robert Dallek

What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don’t fight war on our soil, we don’t have direct experience of it, so there’s an openness about the meanings we give to it.

– Robert Dallek

For those of us who cry out for gun control, our fears cannot be eliminated as long as the country remains an armed camp in which the most troubled among us can find ways to appropriate one of the easily available weapons in all our communities.

– Robert Dallek

The rise of the Tea Party, along with the emergence of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Carl Paladino in New York and Ron Paul in Kentucky, is not the first time in American history that voters have responded to hard economic times by supporting angry, unorthodox Senate and gubernatorial candidates.

– Robert Dallek

John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning, he was too tired to stay awake any longer.

– Robert Dallek

In seeking an empire of liberty, Jefferson wished not only to expand the country’s territorial holdings, but also to extend American institutions around the globe.

– Robert Dallek

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