Quotes from David Von Drehle

History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present.

Exploration and invention were the two faces on the coin of progress, and progress was the spirit of the age

From the summer of 1909 to the end of 1911, New York waist makers - young immigrants, mostly women - achieved something profound. They were a catalyst for the forces of change: the drive for women's rights (and other civil rights), the rise of unions, and the use of activist government to address social problems.

The young immigrants in the garment factories, alight with a spirit of progress, impatient with the weight of tradition, hungry for improvement in a new land and a new century, organized themselves to demand a more fair and humane society.

They heard Rose Pastor Stokes quote Marx: "Workers, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains—and you have the world to gain.

Next, the bystanders saw something large and dark fall from one of the windows. "Someone's in there, all right," said a voice in the crowd. "He's trying to save his best cloth." When the next bundle began falling, the onlookers realized that it was a human being.

What Marcus Aurelius understood is that all of us are slaves in certain respects, even the emperor of Rome. We are slaves to time and chance; we are indentured to fate. "Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own," he wrote in his Meditations. In another gem, he observed that "it never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality. The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.

We must forget past failures," he advised in one of his sermons, "for many times we forget the things of today in lamenting the failures of the past.… Some men regret the last rays of the setting sun, while others look toward the east for the first light of dawn.

Charlie made an art of living. He understood, as great artists do, that every life is a mixture of comedy and tragedy, joy and sorrow, daring and fear. We choose the tenor of our lives from those clashing notes. Even when Charlie's strength was fading, when the golf course had become an obstacle course, when the infirmity of encroaching time could no longer be denied, he chose to turn his wedge into a walking stick and to carry it with panache.

He had a gift for seizing joy, grabbing opportunities, and holding on to things that matter. And he had an unusual knack for an even more difficult task: letting go of all the rest.

If you're negative, your whole body suffers. A negative person falls apart, because the food that is supplied with optimism is not present." An optimist does not deny darkness. Optimists like Charlie refuse to sink into it, to hide in it, to surrender to darkness.

It's natural to look at a goal and think… it might not be attainable. The trick is to ignore the "not." Charlie had a gift for ignoring.

The mansion and its furnishings cost nine million dollars—the equivalent of more than 150 million dollars today. "Extravagance and ostentation marked every social gathering" at Marble House, the New York Times observed, and "the jewels worn at balls were valued in the millions of dollars.

Lower East Side socialism favored the worker over the boss and the group over the individual.

Just do the right thing." The simplicity is so removed from my own generation of helicopter parents.

he knew no secrets to a long life, he knew plenty about a happy life. Through tragedy and loss, poverty and setbacks, missteps and blown chances, he maintained a steadiness, an evenness, and a self-reliance that today might be called resilience. He had a gift for seizing joy, grabbing opportunities, and holding on to things that

Let it go and Hold on! In the way of so many great philosophies, those apparent opposites prove to be two sides of the same coin. To hold securely to the well-formed purposes of your own will, you must let go of the vain idea that you can control people or events or the tides of fate. You can't change what was, nor entirely control what will be. But you can choose who you are and what you stand for and what you will try to accomplish.

In the grip of depression or anxiety, any affirmative step is better than paralysis. Action promotes more action; decision produces decision; living generates life.

later, he put such questions before us. If all the trappings were stripped away, leaving only my true self, who would I be? Am I living fully as that self in every moment? And when it ends, will my story have meaning