Quotes from Richard Brookhiser

[Washington had won] a war for independence and then gone home. [He embodied] the legend of the Roman who returned to his plow after saving his country.

Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.

He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

Lincoln loved other people's jokes as much as his own.

The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.

To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.

Dominance can be a tempration to division. "There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.

Moderation was the effect of congenital optimism. Why push too hard at an open door?

Honesty is a good thing, but it comes in different flavors. Honesty about our feelings is sincerity. Honesty about our intentions is candor. But suppose our feelings or intentions are childish or evil. What then do we gain by expressing or allowing them? The most important form of honesty, especially in a leader, is determining the right course of action and forthrightly pursuing it.

Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.

Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.

Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.

One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.

Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.

Most principles are limp until they are tested.

It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.

The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.

Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.

When Marshall died in 1835, he and the Court he led had rebuked two presidents, Congress, and a dozen states and laid down principles of law and politics that still apply.

She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.