The Soul of America Quotes

“You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists;”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything,” Aristotle wrote. “The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“To know what has come before is to be armed against despair. If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward that most enchanting and elusive of destinations: a more perfect Union.
To do so requires innumerable acts of citizenship and private grace. It will require, as it has in the past, the witness and the bravery of reformers who hold no office and who have no traditional power but who yearn for a better, freer way of life. And will also require, I believe, a president of the United States with a temperamental disposition to speak to the country's hopes rather than to its fears.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“In our finest hours...the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject. In so doing, America has grown ever stronger, confident that the choice of light over dark is the means by which we pursue progress.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are “in the midst of great prosperity.” Those who are frightened of losing what they have are the most vulnerable, and it is difficult to be clear-headed when you believe that you are teetering on a precipice. “No passion,” Edmund Burke wrote, “so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong. Fear feeds anxiety and produces anger; hope, particularly in a political sense, breeds optimism and feelings of well-being. Fear is about limits; hope is about growth. Fear casts its eyes warily, even shiftily, across the landscape; hope looks forward, toward the horizon. Fear points at others, assigning blame; hope points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The story of America is...one of slow, often unsteady steps forward. If we expect the trumpets of a given era to sound unwavering notes, we will be disappointed, for the past tells us that politics is an uneven symphony.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“To everything, in other words, there is a season, and McCarthy’s hubris hastened the end of his hour upon the stage. “I was fully aware of McCarthy’s faults, which were neither few nor minor,” Cohn recalled. “He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had—in order to draw attention to the rock-bottom seriousness of the situation. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements.” The urge to overstate, to overdramatize, to dominate the news, could be costly, and so it proved to be for McCarthy. The Wisconsin senator, Cohn said, was essentially a salesman. “He was selling the story of America’s peril,” Cohn recalled. “He knew that he could never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation. In consequence, he stepped up circumstances a notch or two”—and in so doing he opened himself to attacks that proved fatal. He oversold, and the customers—the public—tired of the pitch, and the pitchman.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin—dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes. Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The war between the ideal and the real, between what’s right and what’s convenient, between the larger good and personal interest is the contest that unfolds in the soul of every American.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“I’ll tell you what leadership is. It’s persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know—or believe in—or will practice.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“this injunction of TR’s remains resonant: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“I am writing now not because past American presidents have always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely does.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for a group to which we belong. Fear feeds anxiety and produces anger; hope, particularly in a political sense, breeds optimism and feelings of well-being. Fear is about limits; hope is about growth. Fear casts its eyes warily, even shiftily, across the landscape; hope looks forward, toward the horizon. Fear points at others, assigning blame; hope points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. —JAMES BALDWIN”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward that most enchanting and elusive of destinations: a more perfect Union.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Whites reigned supreme. Within about three decades of Lee’s surrender, angry and alienated Southern whites who had lost a war had successfully used terror and political inflexibility (a refusal to concede that the Civil War had altered the essential status of black people) to create a postbellum world of American apartheid. Many white Americans had feared a postslavery society in which emancipation might lead to equality, and they had successfully ensured that no such thing should come to pass, North or South. Lynchings, church burnings, and the denial of access to equal education and to the ballot box were the order of the decades. A succession of largely unmemorable presidents served after Grant; none successfully marshaled the power of the office to fight the Northern acquiescence to the South’s imposition of Jim Crow. “We fought,” a Confederate veteran from Georgia remarked in 1890, “for the supremacy of the white race in America.” That was a war they won—and, in a central American irony, they did so not alone but with the aid and comfort of many of their former foes on the field of battle.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.” She continued: I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American…. I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. I think that it is high time that we remembered that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation…. Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Reason, religion, and capitalism were the tributaries that met to form the powerful American river that so impressed Turgot and his contemporaries. By replacing revelation and hereditary authority with rationality and republicanism, the American nation gave political form to the idea that the divine rights of monarchs and prelates had to surrender to the primacy of individual conscience and equality. No longer would certain men, by an accident of birth (kings) or an incident of election (popes), be granted absolute power over the humblest of others. This view of the intrinsic equality of every person—or at least of nearly every propertied white man—drew on secular philosophical insights, the ethos of the Protestant Reformation, and the prevailing culture of the Scientific Revolution.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Fear divides; hope unifies.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we’re getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Johnson said: “John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation’s bloodstream.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Arguing for black enfranchisement in 1867, Frederick Douglass said: “If black men have no rights in the eyes of white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the blacks. The result is a war of races, and the annihilation of all proper human relations.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels