227 Quotes by Jon Meacham

The traditional religious right’s failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.

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.

My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.

A small thing, but in a dissonant world, every moment of harmony counts – and if we share music, we might just shout in anger a little less and sing in unity more. Or so we can hope.

Jefferson sensed that, as with lovers and intimate friends, there can often be no middle ground between engagement and estrangement. In the presence of passion, or of former passions, acquaintance is impossible. It is all or nothing, for once affections have cooled it is very difficult to bring them back to a middling temperature. In such cases human nature tends to rekindle the flames to their old force, or consign them to perpetual chill.

For Jefferson, politics was not a dispiriting distraction but an undertaking that made everything else possible.

Washington believed that every man was “accountable to God alone for his religious opinions” and “ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.

Johnson said: “John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed – that America must move forward. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation’s bloodstream.

The attacks of September 11 – and subsequent acts of terror from London to Madrid to Fort Hood, Texas – embody the most repulsive of human instincts, the will to power at the price of the lives of others.