Top 200 Jon Meacham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is nothing new under the sun.”

— Jon Meacham

2. “World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.”

— Jon Meacham

3. “An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.”

— Jon Meacham

4. “The more we can do to support and promulgate the intellectual traditions of the Abrahamic faiths – of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – the better armed we will be to fight fundamentalism.”

— Jon Meacham

5. “The central tenet of Christianity as it has come down to us is that we are to reach out when our instinct is to pull inward; to give when we want to take; to love when we are inclined to hate; to include when are tempted to exclude.”

— Jon Meacham

6. “In a democracy, the pursuit of power for power’s sake, devoid of devotion to equal justice and fair play, is tempting but destructive.”

— Jon Meacham

7. “You don’t kick a man when he is down,” Bush dictated. “You don’t revel in his demise. You don’t pile on in life.”

— Jon Meacham

8. “A lot of people, including business leaders, think the future belongs to China. Globalization is not a zero-sum game, but we need to hone our skills to stay in play.”

— Jon Meacham

9. “We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.”

— Jon Meacham

10. “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

11. “History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. – JAMES BALDWIN.”

— Jon Meacham

12. “Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.”

— Jon Meacham

13. “Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.”

— Jon Meacham

14. “Once the cry and the cause of a generation of progressives to make America safer, fairer and cleaner, ‘regulation’ is now a dirty word in our politics. Even Democrats are quick to talk about cutting regulations; Republicans hate them with – how to put it? – evangelical fervor.”

— Jon Meacham

15. “In America, now, let us – Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, wiccan, whatever – fight nativism with the same strength and conviction that we fight terrorism. My faith calls on its followers to love one’s enemies. A tall order, that – perhaps the tallest of all.”

— Jon Meacham

16. “America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the “broad, sun-lit uplands.””

— Jon Meacham

17. “The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing.”

— Jon Meacham

18. “Asked whether history had ever seen anything like the Depression, John Maynard Keynes replied: “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.”

— Jon Meacham

19. “With a chuckle, Churchill had replied: “Neither look for nor expect gratitude but rather get whatever comfort you can out of the belief that your effort is constructive in purpose.”

— Jon Meacham

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Liberty is precious. But so is life. It should not be so difficult for men and women of good will and good heart and sound mind to find the right balance between the two.”

— Jon Meacham

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “But “the supreme judge of the world” and “divine providence” were no more specific to the God of the Bible than “Creator” and “Nature’s God.”

— Jon Meacham

27. “No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.”

— Jon Meacham

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

30. “We are exceptional not because of who we are but because of what we do and how we put the ideals of human dignity, individual freedom, and liberty under law into action.”

— Jon Meacham

31. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.2 – American motto suggested.”

— Jon Meacham

32. “Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.”

— Jon Meacham

33. “It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.”

— Jon Meacham

34. “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

35. “Fear divides; hope unifies.”

— Jon Meacham

36. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

37. “Dignified theatricality is an essential element of power.”

— Jon Meacham

38. “Without education, we are weaker economically. Without economic power, we are weaker in terms of national security. No great military power has ever remained so without great economic power.”

— Jon Meacham

39. “Democracy is easy; republicanism is hard. Democracy is fueled by passion; republicanism is founded on moderation. Democracy is loud, raucous, disorderly; republicanism is quiet, cool, judicious – and that we still live in its light is the Founders’ most wondrous deed.”

— Jon Meacham

40. “The world was not perfect, nor was it perfectible, but on we went, in the face of inequities and inequalities, seeking to expand freedom at home, to defend liberty abroad, to conquer disease and go to the stars. For notably among nations, the United States has long been shaped by the promise, if not always by the reality, of forward motion, of rising greatness, and of the expansion of knowledge, of wealth, and of happiness.”

— Jon Meacham

41. “Jefferson believed in the future, and why not? His own lifetime was testament to the possibility of political and intellectual progress. The past, he thought, should hold no magical, unexamined claim over the present. “Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” he wrote in 1816.40 They.”

— Jon Meacham

42. “The government invented the Internet.”

— Jon Meacham

43. “The middle class, one of the great achievements in history, is becoming more of a relic than a reality.”

— Jon Meacham

44. “Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.”

— Jon Meacham

45. “Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. “Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing,” Clay recalled. “I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.”

— Jon Meacham

46. “Given that sexual orientation is innate and that we are all, in theological terms, children of God, to deny access to some sacraments based on sexuality is as wrong as denying access to some sacraments based on race or gender.”

— Jon Meacham

47. “The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch’d with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted.”

— Jon Meacham

48. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

49. “It is error alone that needs the support of government.2 Truth can stand by itself. – THOMAS JEFFERSON, on freedom of religion.”

— Jon Meacham

50. “It’s Shakespeare, to have a single family in which human flaws and virtues are on such vivid display – and the constant struggle between those vices and those virtues to try to do good and fulfill one’s duty.”

— Jon Meacham