Quotes from Jon Meacham

president drew on the third chapter of the Book of Genesis: "In the sweat of thy face," the Lord commanded, "shalt thou eat bread." Adam and Eve are being expelled from the Garden of Eden; the whole structure of the world as we know it was being formed in this moment. To work for one's own wealth, rather than taking wealth from others, was the will of God.

An interest willing to suppress speech was an interest willing to put its own power ahead of democracy.

all those who conduct themselves worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.

Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they

for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts.

Americans tend to prefer their presidents on horseback: heroes who dream big and sound trumpets. There is, however, another kind of leader – quieter and less glamorous but no less significant – whose virtues repay our attention. There is greatness in political lives dedicated more to steadiness than to boldness, more to reform than to revolution, more to management of complexity than to the making of mass movements.

The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch'd with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.

I THINK IT IS MONTAIGNE who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head

If we did a good act merely from the love of god, and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the atheist?" Jefferson once asked. "It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being exists." Religion, then, could not claim to be the universal source of individual moral conduct.

Honor, duty, country. Those verities, together with a driving ambition and an abiding competitive spirit, had shaped his life and his understanding of the nation.

At seventy-five, Churchill said: "I am prepared to meet my Maker. But whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

The world was not perfect, nor was it perfectible, but on we went, in the face of inequities and inequalities, seeking to expand freedom at home, to defend liberty abroad, to conquer disease and go to the stars. For notably among nations, the United States has long been shaped by the promise, if not always by the reality, of forward motion, of rising greatness, and of the expansion of knowledge, of wealth, and of happiness.

It's Shakespeare, to have a single family in which human flaws and virtues are on such vivid display—and the constant struggle between those vices and those virtues to try to do good and fulfill one's duty.

We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's what we believed in, that's why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he's going to take our country back. And that's what we gotta do.

There it was again: conscience. Lincoln believed he was acting according to motives higher than the merely political. "The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance," Lincoln had written to the Quaker Eliza P. Gurney in September. "Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us.

the party endorsed the "speedy construction" of the transcontinental railroad and a "liberal and just" policy of immigration given that "foreign immigration…has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation.

The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase "We, the People" that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

Therein lies a lesson: If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence. Lincoln offered a case study in the leadership of hope and progress; Andrew Johnson's is an unhappier story of willfulness and single-minded service to a favored constituency—in this case, to white Southerners.

He was seeking the presidency of a country riven not only by competing interests but by incompatible understandings of reality.

The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong.

It was, instead, about urging African Americans to draw on the traditions of the American Revolution to battle state-sanctioned white supremacy in order to claim their rightful place as citizens.

The genius of America lies in its capacity to forge a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious, and ethnic origins….The American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities….

The presidency which under Lincoln had been a tool of transformation had become, under Johnson, a refuge from modernity.