Quotes from Jon Meacham

There was, of course, a more immediate point to frequent gatherings of lawmakers, diplomats, and cabinet officers at the president's table. It tends to be more difficult to oppose—or at least to vilify—someone with whom you have broken bread and drunk wine. Caricatures crack as courses are served; imagined demonic plots fade with dessert. Jefferson

The day is dark and gloomy, unsettled and uncertain, like the condition of our country, in regard to the unnatural war with Mexico

The lesson of Lewis was that sustained personal witness to injustice, borne in the public arena where opinions are shaped, laws enacted, and reality changed, is vital. "John's

Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep for fear that I will wake up and our democracy will be gone and never return.

From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule—one common to the world's religious and moral traditions—has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln's own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," he once wrote. "This expresses my idea of democracy.

Conscience and character were not incidental to human affairs, but instrumental.

religion. "I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy," Paine wrote. "I do not believe…in the creed of any church I know of.

In a democracy, the pursuit of power for power's sake, devoid of devotion to equal justice and fair play, is tempting but destructive

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as "the capability of a people to govern themselves.

solemn faithfulness, courage that cannot be daunted, hopefulness that cannot be dashed

Lincoln asked. "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!…I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us….If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as "the capability of a people to govern themselves." He worried about trouble coming from the many as well as the few—or even the one, in the form of a demagogue who might try to profit from lawlessness and distrust.

Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.

The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

have apparent confidence in all, real confidence in none, until from actual experience it is found that the individual is worthy of it—from this rule I have never departed.… When I have found men mere politicians, bending to the popular breeze and changing with it, for the self-popularity, I have ever shunned them, believing that they were unworthy of my confidence—but still treat them with hospitality and politeness.

Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence

corner of the Champs-Élysées and the rue de Berri.30

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.

To the visitors, it was clear that "the Bible denounced oppression as one of the highest of crimes, and threatened Divine judgments against nations that practice it;…that the virus of secession is found wherever the virus of slavery extends, and no farther; so that there is the amplest reason for expecting to avert Divine judgments by putting away the sin, and for hoping to remedy the national troubles by striking at their cause.

In his closing remarks, King spoke from a mountaintop, a prophet bringing word from on high. Lewis spoke more simply, from the valley, among the people whose burdens he knew because they were his burdens too.

Man's capacity for self-government is on trial before the world," he said, "and we must conquer or the verdict will be against democratic government and in favor of privilege and despotism everywhere. The conspirators and rebels are attempting the destruction of our democratic government, because democracy…is opposed to privilege and slavery.

The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good.

it's shrewd to put new words to an old tune, especially if you're trying to turn the familiar on its head.

Historians of the twenty-first century," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, "will no doubt struggle to explain how nine-tenths of the American people, priding themselves every day on their kindliness, their generosity, their historic consecration to the rights of man, could so long have connived in the systematic dehumanization of the remaining tenth—and could have done so without not just a second but hardly a first thought.