"A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end"
About this Quote
Wallace’s line is an attempt to give liberalism a spine: not soft-hearted optimism, but a disciplined wager on history. He starts by granting the conservative premise that stability is fragile. “The only certainty…is change” is a refusal of nostalgia as policy. The pivot is where the politics lives: change isn’t just weather to endure; it’s a current that can be steered. In that one move, he reframes liberal governance as pragmatic control, not utopian dreaming.
The subtext is a rebuke to two kinds of fatalism. One is the right’s tendency to treat disruption as moral decay and therefore grounds for retrenchment. The other is the left’s temptation to confuse motion with progress, as if the arc of events bends on its own. Wallace is arguing for agency, for institutions, for planning - the boring machinery that turns “constructive end” from a slogan into a set of budgets, regulations, and public works.
Context matters: Wallace was a New Deal Democrat, then a wartime vice president, speaking from an era when government had just proven it could remake daily life at scale - electrification, farm policy, labor protections - and then mobilize a continent for World War II. His confidence is historically specific: he’s describing a moment when Americans had watched deliberate coordination beat depression-era chaos.
Rhetorically, the sentence flatters a modern temperament: sober about uncertainty, yet allergic to cynicism. It’s liberalism as managerial courage - an ethic that says the future will arrive regardless, so you might as well take responsibility for its shape.
The subtext is a rebuke to two kinds of fatalism. One is the right’s tendency to treat disruption as moral decay and therefore grounds for retrenchment. The other is the left’s temptation to confuse motion with progress, as if the arc of events bends on its own. Wallace is arguing for agency, for institutions, for planning - the boring machinery that turns “constructive end” from a slogan into a set of budgets, regulations, and public works.
Context matters: Wallace was a New Deal Democrat, then a wartime vice president, speaking from an era when government had just proven it could remake daily life at scale - electrification, farm policy, labor protections - and then mobilize a continent for World War II. His confidence is historically specific: he’s describing a moment when Americans had watched deliberate coordination beat depression-era chaos.
Rhetorically, the sentence flatters a modern temperament: sober about uncertainty, yet allergic to cynicism. It’s liberalism as managerial courage - an ethic that says the future will arrive regardless, so you might as well take responsibility for its shape.
Quote Details
| Topic | Change |
|---|
More Quotes by Henry
Add to List
