Top 100 Meacham Quotes
#1. I'm impressed with how 'Newsweek's' outstanding staff has continued to put out a lively, well-informed magazine after the departure of their tireless editor, Jon Meacham.
Tina Brown
#2. 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
#3. It was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is seeking power. The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing.
Jon Meacham
#4. 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
#5. To be tall and forbidding might command respect for a time, but not affection. To be overly familiar might command affection for a time, but not respect.
Jon Meacham
#6. We live in a center-right country. Now watch me smile oleaginously.
Jon Meacham
#7. Like the Bible-a document that often contradicts itself and from which one can construct sharply different arguments-theology is the product of human hands and hearts.
Jon Meacham
#8. 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
#9. I'm learning not to hope for what I can't control ...
Leila Meacham
#10. A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible account with the ideal and the principled.
Jon Meacham
#11. As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid.
Jon Meacham
#12. Jefferson had his own privy just steps away from his bed alcove, one of three in the house proper.12 He used pieces of scrap paper for hygiene purposes.13 (Examples were collected from his privy by a family member on the day of Jefferson's death and now survive in the Library of Congress.)14 He
Jon Meacham
#13. The American system of political spending is so unregulated that it might make Adam Smith rethink free markets.
Jon Meacham
#14. The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing.
Jon Meacham
#16. 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
#17. An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.
Jon Meacham
#18. 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
#19. America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the "broad, sun-lit uplands."
Jon Meacham
#20. Whenever there is news of a terrible shooting, I wonder why America has so miserably failed to enact even common-sense gun legislation.
Jon Meacham
#21. I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson's frequent use of "it's" for "its" and "recieve" for "receive,
Jon Meacham
#22. 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
#23. We are now living in a post-Roosevelt, post-Reagan universe. What comes next will not be post-partisan, because faction is an intrinsic human impulse.
Jon Meacham
#24. Bushes didn't whine. "Do your best and don't look back" - that was the code.
Jon Meacham
#25. Without education, we are weaker economically. Without economic power, we are weaker in terms of national security. No great military power has ever remained so without great economic power.
Jon Meacham
#26. In America, now, let us - Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, wiccan, whatever - fight nativism with the same strength and conviction that we fight terrorism. My faith calls on its followers to love one's enemies. A tall order, that - perhaps the tallest of all.
Jon Meacham
#27. The middle class, one of the great achievements in history, is becoming more of a relic than a reality.
Jon Meacham
#28. Politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.
Jon Meacham
#29. Jefferson was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying.
Jon Meacham
#30. His experience of the past two decades in foreign policy had also taught him that time often resolved the issues of the hour.
Jon Meacham
#31. It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.
Jon Meacham
#32. My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts, and will never take counsel from me as to what that judgment should be.
Jon Meacham
#33. Don't be afraid to let it go. Releasing hate does not make you forget what you want always to remember. It does not mean reconciliation.
Leila Meacham
#34. President Obama is now losing to 'Republican Nominee' in polls - no name needed.
Jon Meacham
#35. It is an unrepresentative city ... .They are so darn sure they are right on everything. The conventional wisdom in Manhattan, Bush believed, often failed to take opposing views into account except to dismiss such opinions as uninformed, prejudiced, and just plain wrong.
Jon Meacham
#36. The denial of the popular will, Jefferson said privately, "opens upon us an abyss at which every sincere patriot must shudder."15
Jon Meacham
#37. With the perspective afforded by the passage of time, where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families, innocents going about their lives, suddenly and brutally murdered, no other day can ever matter as much.
Jon Meacham
#38. Given that sexual orientation is innate and that we are all, in theological terms, children of God, to deny access to some sacraments based on sexuality is as wrong as denying access to some sacraments based on race or gender.
Jon Meacham
#39. 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
#40. The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much.
Jon Meacham
#41. The power of the American system of republicanism lies in its capacity to allow religious belief to be a competing, not a controlling, factor in American life.
Jon Meacham
#42. You don't kick a man when he is down," Bush dictated. "You don't revel in his demise. You don't pile on in life.
Jon Meacham
#43. Man ... feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election, one day in the year, but every day.
Jon Meacham
#44. He drank no hard liquor but loved wine, taking perhaps three glasses a day.42 He did not smoke. When he received gifts of Havana cigars from well-wishers, he passed them along to friends.43
Jon Meacham
#45. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.
Jon Meacham
#46. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions ... but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. ...
Jon Meacham
#47. Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think.
Jon Meacham
#48. The way to put oneself in a position to take the harder, more honorable political path is to argue for one's virtues in a vigorous way.
Jon Meacham
#49. Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.
Jon Meacham
#50. 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
#51. Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.
Jon Meacham
#52. 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
#53. History tells us that America does best when the private sector is energetic and entrepreneurial and the government is attentive and engaged. Who among us, really, would, looking back, wish to edit out either sphere at the entire expense of the other?
Jon Meacham
#54. 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
#55. A lot of people, including business leaders, think the future belongs to China. Globalization is not a zero-sum game, but we need to hone our skills to stay in play.
Jon Meacham
#57. 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
#58. Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class.
Jon Meacham
#59. The service
a moved Roosevelt called it the "keynote" of his meeting with Churchill
was working a kind of magic, which is one of the points of liturgy and theater: to use the dramatic to convince people of a reality they cannot see.
Jon Meacham
#60. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder, [and] it pains me to an unspeakable degree." J
Jon Meacham
#61. Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a transcendent personality; other presidents who followed him were not transformative, and served unremarkably.
Jon Meacham
#62. I do not believe 'Newsweek' is the only catcher in the rye between democracy and ignorance, but I think we're one of them, and I don't think there are that many on the edge of that cliff.
Jon Meacham
#63. For devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts.
Jon Meacham
#64. Attacks on a politician's identity - questioning Romney's religion, say, or Obama's birthplace - tend to come when an opponent is desperate and can't sell himself.
Jon Meacham
#65. 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
#66. Well," Bush answered, "I'm worried that sometimes your idealism will get in the way of what I think is sound governance.
Jon Meacham
#67. [T]o argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt.
Jon Meacham
#68. The lesson of the Clinton years and of Obama's win of both the nomination and the general election in 2008 is that Democrats need to be as tough as JFK was.
Jon Meacham
#69. Everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will," Jefferson said.72 "This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance.
Jon Meacham
#70. America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises. So was Jefferson. In his head and in his heart, as in the nation itself, the perfect warred with the good, the intellectual with the visceral.
Jon Meacham
#71. He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.
Jon Meacham
#72. It would be wonderful if the public sector were always great, or always terrible; or if the private sector were always great, or always terrible. Alas, reality is more complicated than comforting caricatures. Governments fail, and corporations fail.
Jon Meacham
#73. Sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.
Jon Meacham
#74. World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
Jon Meacham
#75. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.
Jon Meacham
#76. The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.
Jon Meacham
#77. All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two
Jon Meacham
#78. The central tenet of Christianity as it has come down to us is that we are to reach out when our instinct is to pull inward; to give when we want to take; to love when we are inclined to hate; to include when are tempted to exclude.
Jon Meacham
#79. The search for the point of temperate power between competing elements of life - the national government and the states, the states and the people - was far from over.
Jon Meacham
#80. 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
#82. 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
#83. knows how this will end: but assuredly in one extreme or the other. There can be no medium between those who have loved so much.
Jon Meacham
#84. Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence,
Jon Meacham
#85. From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.
Jon Meacham
#86. Scripture is not inerrant; believers are called to interpret biblical texts in light of tradition and reason.
Jon Meacham
#87. I THINK IT IS MONTAIGNE who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head,
Jon Meacham
#88. 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
#89. The more we can do to support and promulgate the intellectual traditions of the Abrahamic faiths - of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - the better armed we will be to fight fundamentalism.
Jon Meacham
#90. As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.1 - THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775
Jon Meacham
#91. Once the cry and the cause of a generation of progressives to make America safer, fairer and cleaner, 'regulation' is now a dirty word in our politics. Even Democrats are quick to talk about cutting regulations; Republicans hate them with - how to put it? - evangelical fervor.
Jon Meacham
#92. And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress - the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country's finest hours lay ahead.
Jon Meacham
#93. If a person is homosexual by nature - that is, if one's sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one's identity as gender or skin color - then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow.
Jon Meacham
#94. No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.
Jon Meacham
#95. Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.
Jon Meacham
#96. Good humor, Jefferson added, "is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration;
Jon Meacham
#97. A globalized world is by now a familiar fact of life. Building walls or moats may sound appealing, but the future belongs to those who tend to their people and then boldly engage the rest of the world, near and far.
Jon Meacham
#98. At Naval Air Station Grosse Ile in Michigan, he and Barbara took a room in town for fourteen dollars a week, but without kitchen privileges. "It is sort of a lonely existence for poor Bar," Bush wrote home to Greenwich, "but she doesn't complain at all, and I am just in heaven having her here.
Jon Meacham
#99. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another.
Jon Meacham
#100. At Monticello he planned to return to farming and gardening with passionate zeal.
Jon Meacham
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