Quotes from Jon Meacham

Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.

the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.

Black people, Taney went on, "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

The message of the civil rights movement was straightforward, and it was a message grounded in hope: We are one people; we are one family; we all live in the same house—the American house, the world house.

To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love. Lincoln believed in a transcendent moral order that summoned sinful creatures, in the words of Micah, to do justice, to love mercy

General Grant, John Hay recalled, was "deeply impressed with…the late Presidential election. The point which impressed him most powerfully was that which I regarded as the critical one—the pivotal centre of our history—the quiet and orderly character of the whole affair. No bloodshed or riot….It proves our worthiness of free institutions, and our capability of preserving them without running into anarchy or despotism.

Wine, furniture, music, horses, and linen consumed Jefferson's resources. "For the articles of household furniture, clothes, and a carriage Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I have been obliged to anticipate my salary from which however I shall never be able to repay it," Jefferson wrote to Monroe.21 "I will pray you to touch this string, which I know to be a tender one with Congress, with the utmost delicacy. I'd rather be ruined in my fortune, than in their esteem." He

The New York Herald said there could be plans "to take the Capitol by violence." The counting of the Electoral College votes, scheduled for Wednesday, February 13, might be stopped.

Lincoln died as he brought about a nation that would ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to abolish slavery and make citizenship for Black Americans a federal constitutional right. In his lifetime, however, he would never fully put into practice the principles summed up in the motto of a newspaper founded in Rochester, New York, in 1847: Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.

Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

With a chuckle, Churchill had replied: "Neither look for nor expect gratitude but rather get whatever comfort you can out of the belief that your effort is constructive in purpose.

As Thoreau wrote in his 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience," "Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large.

Alluding to the construction, at the Tidal Basin, of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson (it was to be dedicated in 1943), Ickes linked past and present. "Genius, like justice, is blind

New York Herald said there could be plans "to take the Capitol by violence." The counting of the Electoral College votes, scheduled for Wednesday, February 13, might be stopped.

the most general sense," the historian Allen C. Guelzo observed, "the paradox of Lincoln's fatalism falls into a pattern that has reapppeared throughout modern Western history, and it arises from the peculiar tendency of determinists, from Oliver Cromwell to Karl Marx, to preach divine or material inevitability at one moment and then turn into the most avowed revolutionary activists at the next.

And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.

constitutional amendment. It backed

Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.

was to shape them in her image: courageous, competitive, caring, and tireless.

The United States, therefore, is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines, through Lend Lease, we would lose this war." True enough, but without Churchill, much of Europe might have been lost to Hitler before Roosevelt and Stalin were in the fight at all.

The roots of King's worldview can be traced to the Bible up through the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, a Rochester, New York, minister and scholar who preached the "Social Gospel" of Christian-inspired reform, love, and action on earth.

Resolved Therefore that the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony and that every attempt to vest such power in any other person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as AMERICAN FREEDOM.50 Men