Quotes from Jon Meacham

Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress

It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere." So long as the resistance was informed by fact and executed with integrity, Jefferson believed, all would be well.

We know instinctively," Jane Addams wrote, "that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.

The time was right for the exploratory journey Jefferson had long pondered. He wanted to find a route to the Pacific and limn the contours of a West that might well become a theater of contention between the United States and imperial powers.

There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT, The Rough Riders and An Autobiography

A willingness to wage constant partisan combat, no matter what the issue, was an emerging requirement in the politics coming into being in the 1830s. Party

the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment.

in Mainz on the last day of May 1989, President Bush had struck the same notes, albeit less dramatically, saying that the "wall stands as a monument to the failure of communism. It must come down.

Under Small's influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant's 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," Kant wrote.21 "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

Hugh Liedtke had a simple rule of thumb: Pick a name that started with either A or Z, so you would be first or last in the telephone listings. With that in mind, the team chose Zapata Petroleum Corporation, after the Marlon Brando movie Viva Zapata!, which was playing in Midland.

By closing our minds to the even remote possibility that a political leader with whom we nearly always disagree might have a point about a particular matter is to preemptively surrender the capacity of the mind to shape our public lives.

Half a world away, on the same Friday, the Chamber of Deputies in France opened debate on paying the United States a debt of 25 million francs (about $5 million) as an indemnity for French damage to American shipping during the Napoleonic wars. France had agreed to pay the money under an 1831 treaty, but after four days of consideration, by a margin of eight, France declined to honor its obligations.

while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after.

FDR had the gifts of self-knowledge and a compassion for the plight of others—saving graces that enabled him to become one of a handful of truly great and transformative presidents.

in the battle between the impulses of good and of evil in the American soul, what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" have prevailed just often enough to keep the national enterprise alive.

King bore witness to a message that was, in Saint Augustine's phrase, "ever ancient, ever new": an insistence that the testimony of the prophets and the example of Christ could march from the past into what King called "the fierce urgency of now" in order to liberate the future.

we hear another president, impossibly young and dashing, his breath white in the inaugural air, telling us to ask not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country.

The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin

The delegates did provide that the president had to be a natural-born citizen, "or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution," suggesting that there has always been a wariness of foreign influence and of the foreign-born.)

If he was diligent in his studies, insistent on acquiring knowledge, and devoted to mercy and grace, he could become not a poor and obscure farmer but a philosopher, a saint, a hero, or a wise, good, great man.

Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence," he told one of his daughters.24 Time spent at study was never wasted. "Knowledge," Jefferson said, "indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.

in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, the Scottish writer and politician Andrew Fletcher brilliantly linked music and civic life, writing, "I knew a very wise man…[ who] believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

To Randolph the answer was self-evident. Jefferson had proved too much of a compromiser. Moderation, Randolph said, was "the mask which ambition has worn" through the ages.27 By the last year of the president's term, Randolph would tell James Monroe, "The old republican party is already ruined, past redemption."28 Jefferson

The absolute equality of races—physical, political and social—is the founding stone of world peace and human advancement. No one denies great differences of gift, capacity and attainment among individuals of all races, but the voice of science, religion and practical politics is one in denying the God-appointed existence of superior races, or of races naturally and inevitably and eternally inferior." For Du Bois, "To deny this fact is to throw