7 Quotes by Andrew Delbanco

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.

The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.

Southerners who had insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights.

To face this fact is to encounter one of the most demanding challenges in thinking about history: explaining how people in the past could have failed to see what seems so clear to us in retrospect. This is an imperative task but also a delicate and exacting one. On one hand, explanation can shade into excuse, on the other hand, passing judgment on the past can be a form of self-congratulation in the present.

Before dismissing such men as ‘mediocre, timid, and weak,’ one might ask oneself how many of us would welcome such a war, especially without the knowledge of hindsight?

Confronting this question takes us beyond a world where the line between good and evil is sharp and bright, into a gray confusion where navigation was soul-trying work.