"Righteousness is easy in retrospect"
About this Quote
Schlesinger’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the moral certainty we like to drape over the past. “Righteousness” isn’t just virtue here; it’s the performance of virtue, the clean posture of judgment taken when the mess has already settled and the casualties are already counted. The sting is in “easy”: history, once edited by outcomes, turns into a rigged test where we already know the correct answers. It’s effortless to be brave when you’re reading the transcript.
The subtext is aimed at a familiar modern sport: treating earlier actors as either monsters or saints, as if they had our information, our moral vocabulary, and our safe distance. Schlesinger, a liberal historian shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, lived inside the very policy arguments that later generations would grade with the red pen of hindsight. His own proximity to power (including work around the Kennedy administration) makes the sentence feel less like armchair relativism and more like a warning from someone who watched decisions get made under pressure, with partial facts and real stakes.
What makes the line work rhetorically is its compact reversal: righteousness is supposed to be hard. By calling it easy “in retrospect,” Schlesinger exposes how moral judgment becomes cheaper when it’s detached from risk. The implication isn’t that judgment is invalid; it’s that judgment without historical empathy becomes self-congratulation. The past becomes a mirror we use to flatter the present, rather than a record that should humble it.
The subtext is aimed at a familiar modern sport: treating earlier actors as either monsters or saints, as if they had our information, our moral vocabulary, and our safe distance. Schlesinger, a liberal historian shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, lived inside the very policy arguments that later generations would grade with the red pen of hindsight. His own proximity to power (including work around the Kennedy administration) makes the sentence feel less like armchair relativism and more like a warning from someone who watched decisions get made under pressure, with partial facts and real stakes.
What makes the line work rhetorically is its compact reversal: righteousness is supposed to be hard. By calling it easy “in retrospect,” Schlesinger exposes how moral judgment becomes cheaper when it’s detached from risk. The implication isn’t that judgment is invalid; it’s that judgment without historical empathy becomes self-congratulation. The past becomes a mirror we use to flatter the present, rather than a record that should humble it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Arthur
Add to List
