Jack > Jack's Quotes

“...Far from the near sanctification of military service common in today´s United States, the Americans of 1790 regarded a standing army virtually by definition as the coercive arm of oppressive government, owing loyalty not to the public but to kings and dictators.--”
― Fergus M. Bordewich, The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government

“The end of Reconstruction is often spoken of in psychological terms, as a collapse of white Americans’ nerve, or as a failure of Republican political will, when in cold truth Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction, much less a bourgeois one.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History

“On September 29, the day after the James attack in Birmingham, the screen showed the arrival in Oxford of former Major General Edwin Walker, who, disciplined for insubordination, had resigned from the U.S. Army in flaming public protest against what he called the Kennedy Administration’s “collaboration and collusion with the international Communist conspiracy.” Walker already had gone on the radio to rally volunteers, confessing that he had been “on the wrong side” when he carried out Eisenhower’s orders to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School five years earlier. “Barnett yes, Castro no!” he declared. “Bring your flags, your tents and your skillets! It is time! Now or never!” Other cameras showed trucks and cars already cruising the streets of Oxford. Intelligence reports picked up Klan Klaverns mobilizing from as far away as Florida. Barnett’s desk was stacked with telegrams offering services to the defense of Mississippi.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

“Eastland had been born in 1904 into a crucible of Mississippi racial violence. Just months before his birth, his father had led a lynch mob seeking vengeance for the murder of Eastland’s uncle. The mob killed at least three people before finally capturing the alleged murderers, a Black couple. Eastland’s relatives beat the suspects, cut off their fingers and ears, and tortured them with corkscrews before burning the couple alive in front of a crowd a thousand strong. Named for his murdered uncle, Eastland had been groomed to take over his family’s plantation holdings, and to maintain the social and political order on which it rested. Upon arriving in Washington in 1941, he had carved out a place for himself as an outspoken champion of white supremacy. He opposed any federal policy that might disrupt it.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“Will couldn’t read the title, but he recognized Donald Trump’s picture on the jacket and assumed it was a get-rich-quick scheme. Obviously, Jake Berman hadn’t taken the man’s advice. Though, considering Berman had lost his job and declared bankruptcy, maybe he had.”
― Karin Slaughter, Undone

“The principle, the identity of private morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation,” he declared. “Washington in his first inaugural said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality. Lincoln proclaimed as a national faith that right makes might. Surely this is so.”
― Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65

“He can’t imagine himself reading to his household; he’s not, like Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher. He never sees More—a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod—without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“sartorial insouciance,”
― Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life