Richard Brookhiser Quotes

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

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

Depression manifests itself in a lack of will.

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

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

Madison loathed Hamilton and loved Jefferson above all.

The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.

Madison lived in his head and public speaking did not come naturally to him.

Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.

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

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

Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries.

He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.

The towering genius is not apolitical.

Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

The young women who attract so much attention never change: They are all stupid. They have at best only the crudest notions of their own power, and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.

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

Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix.

Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.

Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.

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

When Marshall died in 1835, he and the Court he led had rebuked two presidents, Congress, and a dozen states and laid down principles of law and politics that still apply.

Washington offered a republican substitute for the dignity of royalty.

As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.

Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.

Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.

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.

Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.

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

[Washington had won] a war for independence and then gone home. [He embodied] the legend of the Roman who returned to his plow after saving his country.