Top 200 Jon Meacham Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “The measure of our political and cultural health cannot be whether we all agree on all things at all times. We don’t, and we won’t. Disagreement and debate – including ferocious disagreement and exhausting debate – are hallmarks of American politics.”

— Jon Meacham

153. “TR’s capacity on some occasions to stand for equality and for openness and in other contexts to argue that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to rule the world was a particular example of a more universal American inconsistency.”

— Jon Meacham

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— 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 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

161. “Liberty itself, meanwhile, was dependent on the moral disposition of the populace. “Machiavelli, discoursing on these matters,” Algernon Sidney, the seventeenth-century English theorist and politician, wrote, “finds virtue to be so essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of Liberty, that he thinks it impossible for a corrupted People to set up a good Government, or for a Tyranny to be introduced if they be virtuous.”

— Jon Meacham

162. “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

163. “The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.”

— Jon Meacham

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

172. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

174. “It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”

— Jon Meacham

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

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

— Jon Meacham

181. “There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”

— Jon Meacham

182. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

184. “At times in its history, Christianity has been an instrument of repression. In our living memory, however, it has also been deployed as a means of liberation and progress.”

— Jon Meacham

185. “The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong.”

— Jon Meacham

186. “Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as “the capability of a people to govern themselves.” He worried about trouble coming from the many as well as the few – or even the one, in the form of a demagogue who might try to profit from lawlessness and distrust.”

— Jon Meacham

187. “There it was again: conscience. Lincoln believed he was acting according to motives higher than the merely political. “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance,” Lincoln had written to the Quaker Eliza P. Gurney in September. “Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us.”

— Jon Meacham

188. “It’s tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced – and too often paid – the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color.”

— Jon Meacham

189. “All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

— Jon Meacham

190. “Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion.”

— Jon Meacham

191. “One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it,” the president said. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” There was no escaping this central truth.”

— Jon Meacham

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

— Jon Meacham

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

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

— Jon Meacham

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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