Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Schlesinger is doing something sly here: he praises democracy while warning about its favorite self-soothing ritual - the committee. Coming from a midcentury liberal historian who watched the New Deal state expand, the Cold War harden, and Vietnam metastasize through layers of “process,” the line reads less like a paean to rugged individualism than an indictment of institutional anesthesia. Committees, in his framing, don’t just dilute ideas; they outsource moral risk. They turn courage into a scheduling problem.

The quote works because it flatters the reader’s private self while indicting the public machinery that claims to represent us. “If we are to survive” sets existential stakes - not personal fulfillment, survival. Then he stacks the virtues: ideas, vision, courage. The first two can be workshoped; the third can’t. Courage requires ownership, and ownership is precisely what committees are designed to distribute until no one can be blamed. That’s the subtext: modern governance and modern organizations excel at producing consensus, not conscience.

His final image - “a room by himself” - is almost aggressively old-fashioned, a little Puritan, a little Kennedy-era romantic. It suggests that intellectual life begins not in collaboration but in self-interrogation, where you can’t hide behind minutes, memos, or “the group’s decision.” In context, it’s a historian’s warning about how civilizations fail: not from a lack of information, but from a surplus of alibis.