Jon Meacham > Quotes

“Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists;”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Broadly put, philosophers think: politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything,” Aristotle wrote. “The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“To know what has come before is to be armed against despair. If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward that most enchanting and elusive of destinations: a more perfect Union.
To do so requires innumerable acts of citizenship and private grace. It will require, as it has in the past, the witness and the bravery of reformers who hold no office and who have no traditional power but who yearn for a better, freer way of life. And will also require, I believe, a president of the United States with a temperamental disposition to speak to the country's hopes rather than to its fears.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are “in the midst of great prosperity.” Those who are frightened of losing what they have are the most vulnerable, and it is difficult to be clear-headed when you believe that you are teetering on a precipice. “No passion,” Edmund Burke wrote, “so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong. Fear feeds anxiety and produces anger; hope, particularly in a political sense, breeds optimism and feelings of well-being. Fear is about limits; hope is about growth. Fear casts its eyes warily, even shiftily, across the landscape; hope looks forward, toward the horizon. Fear points at others, assigning blame; hope points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“In our finest hours...the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject. In so doing, America has grown ever stronger, confident that the choice of light over dark is the means by which we pursue progress.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The story of America is...one of slow, often unsteady steps forward. If we expect the trumpets of a given era to sound unwavering notes, we will be disappointed, for the past tells us that politics is an uneven symphony.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin—dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes. Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“To everything, in other words, there is a season, and McCarthy’s hubris hastened the end of his hour upon the stage. “I was fully aware of McCarthy’s faults, which were neither few nor minor,” Cohn recalled. “He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had—in order to draw attention to the rock-bottom seriousness of the situation. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements.” The urge to overstate, to overdramatize, to dominate the news, could be costly, and so it proved to be for McCarthy. The Wisconsin senator, Cohn said, was essentially a salesman. “He was selling the story of America’s peril,” Cohn recalled. “He knew that he could never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation. In consequence, he stepped up circumstances a notch or two”—and in so doing he opened himself to attacks that proved fatal. He oversold, and the customers—the public—tired of the pitch, and the pitchman.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a transcendent personality; other presidents who followed him were not transformative, and served unremarkably.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“The war between the ideal and the real, between what’s right and what’s convenient, between the larger good and personal interest is the contest that unfolds in the soul of every American.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Leadership meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“As much as Jefferson loved France residence abroad gave him greater appreciation for his own nation. He was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home. Moving between two worlds, translating the best of the old into the new and explaining the benefits of the new to the old, he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir-the people will set things right.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“I am writing now not because past American presidents have always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely does.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“this injunction of TR’s remains resonant: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels