Quotes from Jon Meacham

Reform is slow work, and it is for neither the fainthearted nor the impatient.

He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever running out.

John Adams had foreseen how central the president would be in American life. "His person, countenance, character, and actions, are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people," Adams wrote in 1790.

Jefferson had his own privy just steps away from his bed alcove, one of three in the house proper.12 He used pieces of scrap paper for hygiene purposes.13 (Examples were collected from his privy by a family member on the day of Jefferson's death and now survive in the Library of Congress.)14 He

The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.

The measure of our political and cultural health cannot be whether we all agree on all things at all times. We don't, and we won't. Disagreement and debate—including ferocious disagreement and exhausting debate—are hallmarks of American politics.

no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the "American Idea," which was a "composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….The idea demands…a democracy—a government of all, for all, and by all.

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way," Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, "and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.

Douglass understood history and the men who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world:

Liberty itself, meanwhile, was dependent on the moral disposition of the populace. "Machiavelli, discoursing on these matters," Algernon Sidney, the seventeenth-century English theorist and politician, wrote, "finds virtue to be so essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of Liberty, that he thinks it impossible for a corrupted People to set up a good Government, or for a Tyranny to be introduced if they be virtuous.

enlarged upon this thesis in another book, The Lost Cause Regained, published in 1868. Pollard

Progress in America does not usually begin at the top and among the few, but from the bottom and among the many.

The question was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the "true cause of the war" and the "true hope of the South.

Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace….The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.

House. "There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded." That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

The people have often made mistakes, but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections. —HARRY S. TRUMAN

TR's capacity on some occasions to stand for equality and for openness and in other contexts to argue that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to rule the world was a particular example of a more universal American inconsistency.

The trust that Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.

I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault'—not 'leadership.'… I'll tell you what leadership is. It's persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It's long, slow, tough work. That's the only kind of leadership I know—or believe in—or will practice.

One need not become a candidate (though that's certainly an option worth considering) or a political addict hooked on every twist and every turn and every tweet. But the paying of attention, the expressing of opinion, and the casting of ballots are foundational to living up to the obligations of citizenship in a republic.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows

To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love.