James

“After much jousting between the Congress and the president over the appointment of more officers, Madison by the end of the year had issued commissions to over eleven hundred individuals, 15 percent of whom immediately declined them, followed by an additional 8 percent who resigned after several months of service.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Fourth and finally, Washington made a passionate case for cultivating an identity as American citizens that would elevate national unity over local loyalties, inducing “them to forget their local prejudices and policies, to make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity, and in some instances, to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community.”
― John Avlon, Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations

“Thackeray sympathised with Disraeli’s characterisation of Peel’s Conservative Party, ‘which conserves nothing, which proposes nothing, which resists nothing, which believes nothing’, but disputed the suggestion that a new generation could reanimate it so that ‘we are one day to reorganise faith and reverence round this wretched, tottering, mouldy, clumsy, old idol’.”
― Daisy Hay, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance

“The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream