Rick Perlstein Quotes

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

~ Rick Perlstein

Stories are how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on. Joan Gideon

~ Rick Perlstein

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

~ Rick Perlstein

Politics is motion. John Sears

~ Rick Perlstein

What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?

~ Rick Perlstein

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

~ Rick Perlstein

An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.

~ Rick Perlstein

He talks to people's grievances, but he doesn't seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew

~ Rick Perlstein

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

~ Rick Perlstein

Now even reformers needed political machines.

~ Rick Perlstein

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

~ Rick Perlstein

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

~ Rick Perlstein

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

~ Rick Perlstein

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

~ Rick Perlstein

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.

~ Rick Perlstein

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

~ Rick Perlstein

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

~ Rick Perlstein

I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate. Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.

~ Rick Perlstein

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

~ Rick Perlstein

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

~ Rick Perlstein

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

~ Rick Perlstein

Richard Nixon's conversation was loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

~ Rick Perlstein

One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was.

~ Rick Perlstein

To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.

~ Rick Perlstein

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

~ Rick Perlstein

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

~ Rick Perlstein

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

~ Rick Perlstein

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

~ Rick Perlstein

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.

~ Rick Perlstein

Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.

~ Rick Perlstein

Chits knew no ideology.

~ Rick Perlstein

Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.

~ Rick Perlstein

Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.

~ Rick Perlstein

He fetishized limits.

~ Rick Perlstein

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.

~ Rick Perlstein

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew

~ Rick Perlstein

The head of Goldwater's California operation what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: Taken your vacation yet? he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.

~ Rick Perlstein

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.

~ Rick Perlstein

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

~ Rick Perlstein

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

~ Rick Perlstein