Richard Brookhiser > Quotes

“Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“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.”
― Richard Brookhiser, John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court

“The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.”
― Richard Brookhiser

“Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Most principles are limp until they are tested.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Inspiring words are potent, and sometimes dangerous, things. They can inspire idiots and devils as well as great man.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Lincoln loved other people's jokes as much as his own.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Moderation was the effect of congenital optimism. Why push too hard at an open door?”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“If enlightened public opinion was a bulwark of freedom, then leaders must labor ceaselessly to enlighten or manipulate it.”
― Richard Brookhiser, James Madison

“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.”
― Richard Brookhiser

“Good politicians know when to move on, sooner or later.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“She became at once more intimate and more exalted.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Washington offered a republican substitute for the dignity of royalty.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“that in republics “the censorial power is in the people over the government and not in the government over the people.” The ideas of the Democratic Societies, he concluded, “will stand or fall by the public opinion....”
― Richard Brookhiser, James Madison

“Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“notice these inconsistencies: Christian and anti-Christian polemicists”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“Dominance can be a tempration to division. "There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.”
― Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

“The Alien Act allowed the president to deport any noncitizen foreigner he thought “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the country, without hearing or trial. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to say or publish anything “false, scandalous and malicious” about the federal government, or Congress.”
― Richard Brookhiser, James Madison