Top 200 Jon Meacham Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The great good news about America – the American gospel, if you will – is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it.”

— Jon Meacham

152. “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

153. “As Thoreau wrote in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” “Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

— Jon Meacham

154. “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.”

— Jon Meacham

155. “The saga of race in America is a tragic one – and it unfolds still. In Lincoln’s hour upon the stage, many hoped he would go farther along the road toward equality than he did; many feared any step at all. But on he walked.”

— Jon Meacham

156. “The people have often made mistakes, but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections. – HARRY S. TRUMAN.”

— Jon Meacham

157. “To blindly and repeatedly assert one’s own position, one’s own righteousness, and one’s own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy – a bid, as Lincoln said, to “rule or ruin in all events.”

— Jon Meacham

158. “Historians of the twenty-first century,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “will no doubt struggle to explain how nine-tenths of the American people, priding themselves every day on their kindliness, their generosity, their historic consecration to the rights of man, could so long have connived in the systematic dehumanization of the remaining tenth – and could have done so without not just a second but hardly a first thought.”

— Jon Meacham

159. “House. “There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.” That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.”

— Jon Meacham

160. “The trust that Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.”

— Jon Meacham

161. “So ran the line from the polemics of Edward Alfred Pollard to the politics of George Corley Wallace – a line connecting the Civil War to the Cold War, the 1860s to the 1960s, a distant America to the contemporary one. The federal government was the villain. States’ rights were the salvation of the Founders’ vision. White supremacy was to be protected.”

— Jon Meacham

162. “To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love.”

— Jon Meacham

163. “Therein lies a lesson: If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence. Lincoln offered a case study in the leadership of hope and progress; Andrew Johnson’s is an unhappier story of willfulness and single-minded service to a favored constituency – in this case, to white Southerners.”

— Jon Meacham

164. “Lincoln agreed: “By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.”

— Jon Meacham

165. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.”

— Jon Meacham

166. “The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a.”

— Jon Meacham

167. “But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once said, “Righteousness is easy, also cheap, in retrospect.” When we condemn posterity for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?”

— Jon Meacham

168. “He was seeking the presidency of a country riven not only by competing interests but by incompatible understandings of reality.”

— Jon Meacham

169. “Politicians, singers, and preachers are in the same business, using sound to move hearts and change minds.”

— Jon Meacham

170. “Addison had written in words reproduced by Murray. “The philosopher, the saint, or the hero, the wise, the good, or the great man, very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light.”

— Jon Meacham

171. “There was more. “I would build a wall of steel,” Walker said, “a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.”

— Jon Meacham

172. “Yet Lincoln could not rest. He could not stop. He ran the race. He could do no other.”

— Jon Meacham

173. “The question was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”

— Jon Meacham

174. “If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence. Lincoln.”

— Jon Meacham

175. “Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage.”

— Jon Meacham

176. “In his closing remarks, King spoke from a mountaintop, a prophet bringing word from on high. Lewis spoke more simply, from the valley, among the people whose burdens he knew because they were his burdens too.”

— Jon Meacham

177. “That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.”

— Jon Meacham

178. “Reform is slow work, and it is for neither the fainthearted nor the impatient.”

— Jon Meacham

179. “The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.”

— Jon Meacham

180. “From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule – one common to the world’s religious and moral traditions – has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln’s own sensibility – both moral and political – was founded on this injunction. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he once wrote. “This expresses my idea of democracy.”

— Jon Meacham

181. “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.”

— Jon Meacham

182. “In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one house – not just the house of black and white, but the house of the South, the house of America,” Lewis said. “We can move ahead, we can move forward, we can create a multiracial community, a truly democratic society. I think we’re on our way there. There may be some setbacks. But we are going to get there. We have to be hopeful. Never give up, never give in, keep moving on.”

— Jon Meacham

183. “Once, when a Republican congressman from Massachusetts accused Lincoln of having changed his mind, Lincoln replied, “Yes, I have; and I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”

— Jon Meacham

184. “God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ’the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

— Jon Meacham

185. “One wishes for a better outcome, for wiser heads, for a more compassionate public. Yet one wishes in vain. The only comfort, if we can call it that, is that a knowledge of our past failings may equip us to confront evil without delay when evil comes again. For it will.”

— Jon Meacham

186. “Our nation found its soul of honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.”

— Jon Meacham

187. “As Lincoln remarked, “It is my private opinion that, if the Lord has been in Springfield once, he will never come the second time.”

— Jon Meacham

188. “We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.”

— Jon Meacham

189. “Now as then, the tradition of faith that drove Lewis is too often used not to pursue justice but to amass power. Now as then, many white Americans profess to believe the gospel. And now as then, too many are content to accede to religious teachings more in principle than in practice. My aim is to show how John Lewis did both – and if he did both, then perhaps more of us can, too.”

— Jon Meacham

190. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever running out.”

— Jon Meacham

191. “An interest willing to suppress speech was an interest willing to put its own power ahead of democracy.”

— Jon Meacham

192. “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? – Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address.”

— Jon Meacham

193. “Douglass understood history and the men who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world:.”

— Jon Meacham

194. “Conscience and character were not incidental to human affairs, but instrumental.”

— Jon Meacham

195. “Black people, Taney went on, “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

— Jon Meacham

196. “The work of reformers – long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work – can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.”

— Jon Meacham

197. “The message of the civil rights movement was straightforward, and it was a message grounded in hope: We are one people; we are one family; we all live in the same house – the American house, the world house.”

— Jon Meacham

198. “Mr. Lincoln had no faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words,” Mary Lincoln recalled. “He never joined a Church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature.”

— Jon Meacham

199. “The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world.”

— Jon Meacham

200. “John Adams had foreseen how central the president would be in American life. “His person, countenance, character, and actions, are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people,” Adams wrote in 1790.”

— Jon Meacham