Brookhiser The Way Quotes

#1. If enlightened public opinion was a bulwark of freedom, then leaders must labor ceaselessly to enlighten or manipulate it.

Richard Brookhiser

#2. Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix.

Richard Brookhiser

#3. Most principles are limp until they are tested.

Richard Brookhiser

#4. Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries.

Richard Brookhiser

#5. Madison loathed Hamilton and loved Jefferson above all.

Richard Brookhiser

#6. To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.

Richard Brookhiser

#7. Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.

Richard Brookhiser

#8. Routine is supposed to be the great deadener of souls; how much worse is the half-completed task, the broken round, the unfulfilled routine?

Richard Brookhiser

#9. The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.

Richard Brookhiser

#10. Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.

Richard Brookhiser

#11. Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.

Richard Brookhiser

#12. Public opinion should not be confused with popular sentiment. Popular sentiment is what people say to one another around their dinner tables. Popular opinion is what they say to callers from polling organizations.

Richard Brookhiser

#13. Inspiring words are potent, and sometimes dangerous, things. They can inspire idiots and devils as well as great man.

Richard Brookhiser

#14. The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.

Richard Brookhiser

#15. Lincoln Road that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, "takes them unawares." The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty. Lincoln wrote that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, "takes them unawares." The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty.

Richard Brookhiser

#16. Good politicians know when to move on, sooner or later.

Richard Brookhiser

#17. Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.

Richard Brookhiser

#18. Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

Richard Brookhiser

#19. One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

Richard Brookhiser

#20. God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.

Richard Brookhiser

#21. She became at once more intimate and more exalted.

Richard Brookhiser

#22. Dominance can be a tempration to division. "There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.

Richard Brookhiser

#23. notice these inconsistencies: Christian and anti-Christian polemicists

Richard Brookhiser

#24. Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.

Richard Brookhiser

#25. Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.

Richard Brookhiser

#26. Aaron Burr was like a new refrigerator. He was bright, cold and empty.

Richard Brookhiser

#27. Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster round them.

Richard Brookhiser

#28. Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.

Richard Brookhiser

#29. A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

Richard Brookhiser

#30. Depression manifests itself in a lack of will.

Richard Brookhiser