Quotes from Jon Meacham

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

Lincoln agreed: "By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a

There was more. "I would build a wall of steel," Walker said, "a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage.

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. He

Lincoln replied, "Yes, I have; and I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

Our nation found its soul of honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.

Now as then, the tradition of faith that drove Lewis is too often used not to pursue justice but to amass power. Now as then, many white Americans profess to believe the gospel. And now as then, too many are content to accede to religious teachings more in principle than in practice. My aim is to show how John Lewis did both—and if he did both, then perhaps more of us can, too.

So ran the line from the polemics of Edward Alfred Pollard to the politics of George Corley Wallace—a line connecting the Civil War to the Cold War, the 1860s to the 1960s, a distant America to the contemporary one. The federal government was the villain. States' rights were the salvation of the Founders' vision. White supremacy was to be protected

The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it.

1940, fearing a third Roosevelt term, the Third Reich had sought to influence the presidential election by placing newspaper ads and paying for isolationist congressmen to attend the Republican National Convention.

Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it," the

Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion.

political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. "The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense," Adams wrote during Jefferson's first term.12

It's tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced—and too often paid—the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color.

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," Lewis said. "We can move ahead, we can move forward, we can create a multiracial community, a truly democratic society. I think we're on our way there. There may be some setbacks. But we are going to get there. We have to be hopeful. Never give up, never give in, keep moving on.

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.

In their parents, children ideally have sources of protection and comfort and love. Parents can also be sources of irritation, fear, and anxiety. Their deaths thus represent both loss and liberation.

in 1890, of Jacob A. Riis's How the Other Half Lives. A pioneering urban journalist, Riis, himself an immigrant from Denmark, had taken powerful photographs of tenement life.

The author of the document would one day come to believe that it was sacred scripture and that his writing desk was a holy object.

The founding religion—at least in the Declaration—was based more on a religion of reason than of revelation. But it was still religion.

A young person should be speaking out for what is fair, what is just, what is right. Speak out for those who have been left out and left behind. That is how the movement goes on.

To blindly and repeatedly assert one's own position, one's own righteousness, and one's own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to "rule or ruin in all events.