"If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
|---|
More Quotes by Arthur
Add to List
