Top 200 Jon Meacham Quotes (2025 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 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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

167. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

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

— Jon Meacham

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Jon Meacham

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “The colonization proposals underscored a tragic reality. One could – and many white Americans did – oppose slavery while failing to engage the prospective creation of a multiracial democracy.”

— Jon Meacham

195. “The founding religion – at least in the Declaration – was based more on a religion of reason than of revelation. But it was still religion.”

— Jon Meacham

196. “And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.”

— Jon Meacham

197. “The New York Herald said there could be plans “to take the Capitol by violence.” The counting of the Electoral College votes, scheduled for Wednesday, February 13, might be stopped.”

— Jon Meacham

198. “The lesson of Lewis was that sustained personal witness to injustice, borne in the public arena where opinions are shaped, laws enacted, and reality changed, is vital. “John’s.”

— Jon Meacham

199. “To seek vindication in the world but to suspect.”

— Jon Meacham

200. “Progress in America does not usually begin at the top and among the few, but from the bottom and among the many.”

— Jon Meacham