227 Quotes by Jon Meacham

As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom – not least freedom of conscience.

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.

So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we’re getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.

I don’t think anyone is qualified to answer questions of eternal fate definitively, much less pinpoint it to a given day.

One of the central memories of my childhood is of hunting – not well; I am a terrible shot – quail and dove and grouse on a farm on the Tennessee River.

With a writer’s eye, Irving detected Jackson’s depths. “As his admirers say, he is truly an old Roman-to which I would add, with a little dash of the Greek; for I suspect he is as knowing as I believe he is honest.

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.

For Jefferson and his contemporaries – and, thankfully, for most of their successors in positions of ultimate authority – one of the main points of public life was to enable human creativity and ingenuity and possibility, not to constrict it.

I am writing now not because past American presidents have always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely does.