Top 200 Jon Meacham Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The American people,” Small added, “must understand that as soon as America doesn’t stand for something in the world, there is going to be a tremendous erosion of freedom.”

— Jon Meacham

102. “The American system of political spending is so unregulated that it might make Adam Smith rethink free markets.”

— Jon Meacham

103. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

104. “In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists;.”

— Jon Meacham

105. “Barack Obama is many things; among them, he is a tough and even ferocious political warrior.”

— Jon Meacham

106. “Preparing for the Kingdom of God meant making the world as like unto that Kingdom as possible, and the Kingdom was to be a new reality of restoration, redemption, renewal, and resurrection.”

— Jon Meacham

107. “Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.”

— Jon Meacham

108. “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time.”

— Jon Meacham

109. “His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large.”

— Jon Meacham

110. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

111. “In the fullness of time, I suspect that bigotry against homosexuals will seem as repugnant as racial prejudice does today. Or so one hopes.”

— Jon Meacham

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

— Jon Meacham

113. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

114. “We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.”

— Jon Meacham

115. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

116. “Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.”

— Jon Meacham

117. “We truly believed that we were on God’s side, and in spite of everything – the beatings, the bombings, the burnings – God’s truth would prevail,” Lewis recalled. The anguish and the duration of the struggle was, in a way, a vindication of the premise of the struggle itself – that this was the ultimate battle to bring light to darkness no matter how often darkness prevailed.”

— Jon Meacham

118. “Part of what I loved – and love – about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I’m interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I’m interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.”

— Jon Meacham

119. “Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention.1 Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. – THOMAS JEFFERSON.”

— Jon Meacham

120. “An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure.”

— Jon Meacham

121. “It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.”

— Jon Meacham

122. “Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power – until he bore executive responsibility.”

— Jon Meacham

123. “The Occupy Wall Street protests at last suggest that America’s wealth gap is once again becoming an organizing political principle in the country.”

— Jon Meacham

124. “The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.”

— Jon Meacham

125. “There was, of course, a more immediate point to frequent gatherings of lawmakers, diplomats, and cabinet officers at the president’s table. It tends to be more difficult to oppose – or at least to vilify – someone with whom you have broken bread and drunk wine. Caricatures crack as courses are served; imagined demonic plots fade with dessert. Jefferson.”

— Jon Meacham

126. “In rich and captivating prose, Jessica DuLong kindly invites the rest of us on the journey of her lifetime: from a dot-com job to the fabled waters of the Hudson River, where she became a fireboat engineer. This is an unusual and fascinating book.”

— Jon Meacham

127. “Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn’t work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won’t work for you either.”

— Jon Meacham

128. “The author of the document would one day come to believe that it was sacred scripture and that his writing desk was a holy object.”

— Jon Meacham

129. “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it,” the.”

— Jon Meacham

130. “As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid.”

— Jon Meacham

131. “A politician’s task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible account with the ideal and the principled.”

— Jon Meacham

132. “In their parents, children ideally have sources of protection and comfort and love. Parents can also be sources of irritation, fear, and anxiety. Their deaths thus represent both loss and liberation.”

— Jon Meacham

133. “If we did a good act merely from the love of god, and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the atheist?” Jefferson once asked. “It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being exists.” Religion, then, could not claim to be the universal source of individual moral conduct.”

— Jon Meacham

134. “In the charged and complicated spheres of identity, politics, philosophy, and power in America, though, racism was not situational but systemic.”

— Jon Meacham

135. “The God of the Declaration does not choose nations or peoples to favor, or others to curse.”

— Jon Meacham

136. “Where Goldwater-ites saw the world in black and white, Rockefeller noted shades of gray.”

— Jon Meacham

137. “The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: “one of the choice ones of the earth.”

— Jon Meacham

138. “The fact is that America has been at her most prosperous when government and the private sector have been not at war, but in a wary, if often underplayed, alliance. History is unmistakable on this point.”

— Jon Meacham

139. “Anyone weighing whether to re-elect the President should take the bin Laden operation into account: it is a powerful exhibit that Obama is a steely Commander in Chief – a critical test for many Americans.”

— Jon Meacham

140. “Parents in the Northeast sometimes invoked the name of Andrew Jackson to frighten misbehaving children.”

— Jon Meacham

141. “Incumbent White House parties have won 10 of the last 18 presidential elections; the odds are tight, but they favor Obama in 2012. And so gloomy Democrats, check your despair; gleeful Republicans, watch the hubris.”

— Jon Meacham

142. “The distinctive feature of that religion lies in the meaning of the verse from Leviticus: that individual liberty for all – all, of any color or creed – is at the very center of the broad faith the Founders nurtured and passed on to us.”

— Jon Meacham

143. “At seventy-five, Churchill said: “I am prepared to meet my Maker. But whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”

— Jon Meacham

144. “I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt’s, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans – but he was also a cold-blooded politician.”

— Jon Meacham

145. “Leadership meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.”

— Jon Meacham

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

— Jon Meacham

147. “Honor, duty, country. Those verities, together with a driving ambition and an abiding competitive spirit, had shaped his life and his understanding of the nation.”

— Jon Meacham

148. “Songs are the soul of movement! – MLK Jr.”

— Jon Meacham

149. “You are now old enough to know how very important to your future life will be the manner in which you employ your present time.”

— Jon Meacham

150. “A young person should be speaking out for what is fair, what is just, what is right. Speak out for those who have been left out and left behind. That is how the movement goes on.”

— Jon Meacham