Gertrude Himmelfarb

“Character, the Victorians believed, was the defining attribute of the individual and the essential prerequisite of the good society.”

“What was once a moral absolute is now a moral option.”

“If the past is a foreign country, it is a country to which we all have a kind of dual citizenship.”

“The de-moralization of society has been accompanied by the de-moralization of the historian.”

“To make virtue ‘problematic’ is the triumphal accomplishment of modernism.”

“For the Victorians, the moral imagination was not a matter of theory but of practice.”

“A compassionate society is not one that relieves individuals of their moral responsibility, but one that enables them to assume it.”

“History is not the judge of virtue, but it is its indispensable witness.”

“We are in danger of losing our memory, and with it, our identity.”

“The postmodernist belief that all values are subjective and arbitrary is a recipe for nihilism.”

“The repudiation of the bourgeois virtues is the great cultural tragedy of our time.”

“For the historian, the particular is the only access to the general.”

“The personal is not the political, and the political is not the personal. They are different realms, with different rules and different purposes.”

“Today, it is the liberals who are the conservatives, who want to conserve the welfare state and all the liberal institutions of the past fifty years.”

“It is not the business of the historian to be a prophet.”