Quotes from H.W. Brands

God worked in mysterious ways; Lincoln wasn't perfect, but he was perfectly suited to his task. "Taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.

Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves, more than the natives. Andrew Carnegie

Let this constitution go forth from this convention, and from the new state, a model instrument of liberal and enlightened principles.

John Adams might have seemed a more obvious candidate for rebellion, being of cantankerous temperament generally.

This senate was a place where good Representatives went when they died. Thomas Reed

One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed

Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.

In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people, no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right.

The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal

A young mark twain on the make: I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp.

Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.

The strike spread with the speed of telepathy.

Years later, a Jackson partisan (who wasn't at Knoxville) said Jackson had praised the melodiousness of "Tennessee" as a word that had "as sweet a flavor on the tongue as hot corn-cakes and honey.

The politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.

He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.

Publicity is the engine of politics.

He was a generous but subtly demanding boss.

Reporter Jacob Riis made it his mission to expose the horrors of poverty in New York. New to working with a camera, his flash actually set the walls of One apartment inhabited by five blind people on fire.

A live-in domestic worker: You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.

Chinese immigrant: Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.

Douglas noted the uproar with wry resignation. "I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy," he observed.

Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.

It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested.[

He noted that the same summer that witnessed the Constitutional Convention saw the passage of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery north of the Ohio River.