Quotes from Jon Meacham

For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of like-minded, and savoring teachers who seemed to be ambassadors from other, richer, writer worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.

Arguing for black enfranchisement in 1867, Frederick Douglass said: "If black men have no rights in the eyes of white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the blacks. The result is a war of races, and the annihilation of all proper human relations.

Preparing for the Kingdom of God meant making the world as like unto that Kingdom as possible, and the Kingdom was to be a new reality of restoration, redemption, renewal, and resurrection

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time.

Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.

Asked whether history had ever seen anything like the Depression, John Maynard Keynes replied: "Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.

In the charged and complicated spheres of identity, politics, philosophy, and power in America, though, racism was not situational but systemic.

I hate polemical politics and polemical divinity," said John Adams. "My religion is founded on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my offenses; upon contrition; upon the duty as well as the necessity of [enduring] with patience the inevitable evils of life; in the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part." There

I believe after a series of years that no government that has the power to collect taxes and declare war, can be restrained but by a display of sufficient power to break it up," Pickens said.

Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention.1 Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. —THOMAS JEFFERSON

But "the supreme judge of the world" and "divine providence" were no more specific to the God of the Bible than "Creator" and "Nature's God.

In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one house—not just the house of black and white, but the house of the South, the house of America

So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we're getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.

The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: "one of the choice ones of the earth.

In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism--one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.

The service--a moved Roosevelt called it the keynote of his meeting with Churchill--was working a kind of magic, which is one of the points of liturgy and theater: to use the dramatic to convince people of a reality they cannot see.

We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.

When the nation sees differently, it enhances its capacity to act differently. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, America has gradually expanded who's included when the country speaks of "We the People.

Johnson said: "John Kennedy's death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation's bloodstream.

All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two

Once, when a Republican congressman from Massachusetts accused Lincoln of having changed his mind, Lincoln replied, "Yes, I have; and I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.2 —American motto suggested

imperfection is the rule, not the exception.

Madison described the state of play well in May 1798: "The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views.…22 Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad." Extreme measures