Andrew Delbanco Quotes

United States, Professor
February 20, 1952

Andrew H. Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2012), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Russian, and Hebrew. Melville: His World and Work (2005), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, was awarded the Lionel Trilling Award by Columbia University, and has been translated into German and Spanish. He has written many essays in journals of culture and opinion, especially The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, on American literature and religion, as well as the history and current state of U.S. higher education.

Also known as Author

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

Andrew Delbanco
- College
- Bullshit
- Acquire
Beecher described slavery as an 'organic sin,' by which he meant that a sing that permeates the body politic so completely that it cannot be cured by targeted excision but must be overwhelmed with an infusion of love.

Andrew Delbanco
- Slavery
- Sin
- Cured

The rebellion was over, the Union restored, and after more than two centuries there was no more slavery from which to run. The vast work of repairing its human devastation had barely begun.

Andrew Delbanco
- Slavery
- Over
- Repairing
Southerners who had insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights.

Andrew Delbanco
- Rights
- Property
- Insisted
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.

Andrew Delbanco
- Good
- Evil
- Confronting
The problem of the 1850s-how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union-was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

Andrew Delbanco
- Problem
- Values
- Slavery
The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.

Andrew Delbanco
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.

Andrew Delbanco

As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a “sad satire to call the States ‘United,’” because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.

Andrew Delbanco
- Slavery
- Nations
- United
As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.

Andrew Delbanco
- People
- Happiness
- Chasing