American Lion Quotes

“Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“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, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“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, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir-the people will set things right.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“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, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“I believe after a series of years that no government that has the power to collect taxes and declare war, can be restrained but by a display of sufficient power to break it up,” Pickens said.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“A contemporary recalled that when Emily’s children and, later, those of Sarah Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s wife, were infants and became “restless and fretful at night, the President, hearing the mother moving about with her little one, would often rise, dress himself, and insist upon having the child, with whom he would walk the floor by the hour, soothing it in his strong, tender arms, while he urged the tired mother to get some rest.” At White House meals, Jackson wanted the family’s youngsters to dine at the table with him: they were not to be kept in the kitchen or nursery, but at the center of the household.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Politics was at once clinical and human, driven by principles and passions that he (the leader) had to master and harness for the good of the whole.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“In rich and captivating prose, Jessica DuLong kindly invites the rest of us on the journey of her lifetime: from a dot-com job to the fabled waters of the Hudson River, where she became a fireboat engineer. This is an unusual and fascinating book.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Far, indeed, in my wishes, very far distant be the day, when our associated and fraternal stripes shall be severed asunder, and when that happy constellation under which we have risen to so much renown, shall be broken up, and be seen sinking, star after star, into obscurity and night!”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Parents in the Northeast sometimes invoked the name of Andrew Jackson to frighten misbehaving children.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Six days later, the president named a postmaster for New Salem, Illinois, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had lost a race for the state legislature. He was a Clay man, but the post was hardly major, and Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept the appointment.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“have apparent confidence in all, real confidence in none, until from actual experience it is found that the individual is worthy of it—from this rule I have never departed.… When I have found men mere politicians, bending to the popular breeze and changing with it, for the self-popularity, I have ever shunned them, believing that they were unworthy of my confidence—but still treat them with hospitality and politeness.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“partisanship’s sake—of seeing politics as blood sport, where the kill is the only object of the exercise—was, Livingston said, too high for a free society to pay. Differences of opinion and doctrine”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“dowager”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Whether I am ever to return or not is for time to reveal, as none but that providence, who rules the destiny of all, now knows,” Jackson said.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“when the time for action has come, stop thinking.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“leader’s creative flexibility and drives his opponents to sputter furiously about their nemesis’s hypocrisy.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Under its president, Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the college was suffused with the idea of Christian service. “In whatever sphere of life you are placed, employ all your powers and all your means of doing good, as diligently and vigorously as you can,” Dwight preached in a sermon entitled “On Personal Happiness.” For Dwight and, ultimately, for Evarts, faith was about not only personal conversion but social transformation and the health of the nation. In their minds, and in the minds of thousands of American believers, there was a direct connection between the godliness of the people and the fate of the country.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“in a given candidate, than they are about the advancement of those measures of which he is conceived to be the supporter.” The transaction between a potential president and the people is often as much about the heart as it is about the mind. “The large masses act in politics pretty much as they do in religion,” a Democratic senator said in the Jackson years. “Every doctrine is with them, more or less, a matter of faith; received, principally, on account of their trust in the apostle.” And they trusted Jackson. They might not always agree with him, they might cringe at his excesses and his shortcomings, but at bottom they believed he was a man of strength who would”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“There is too much at stake to allow pride or passion to influence your decision, he later said. "Never for a moment believe that the great body of the citizens of any States or States can deliberately intend to do wrong. They may, under the influence of temporary excitement or misguided opinions, commit mistakes; they may be misled for a time by they suggestions of self-interest; but in a community so enlightened and patriotic as the people of the United States argument will soon make them sensible of their errors, and when convinced they will be ready to repair them.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Jackson was a politician, not a philosopher, and politicians generally value power over strict intellectual consistency, which leads a president's supporters to nod sagely at their leader's creative flexibility and drives his opponents to sputter furiously about their nemesis's hypocrisy.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House