Songs of America Quotes

“Songs are the soul of movement! - MLK Jr.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“A small thing, but in a dissonant world, every moment of harmony counts--and if we share music, we might just shout in anger a little less and sing in unity more. Or so we can hope.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“Politicians, singers, and preachers are in the same business, using sound to move hearts and change minds.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“Alluding to the construction, at the Tidal Basin, of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson (it was to be dedicated in 1943), Ickes linked past and present. “Genius, like justice, is blind,”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“it’s shrewd to put new words to an old tune, especially if you’re trying to turn the familiar on its head.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“There's something about the transporting capacity of music, something about it's odd but undeniable ability to create a collective experience by firing our individual imaginations, that's more likely to open our minds and our hearts to competing points of view.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“Invoking John Winthrop, Reagan said, “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.” It was a free, proud city, built on a strong foundation, full of commerce and creativity, he said, adding, “If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Whatever his faults, Ronald Reagan believed in the possibilities of a country that was forever reinventing itself. “And how stands the city on this winter night?” Reagan asked. “More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago…. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“A true patriot salutes the flag but always makes sure it’s flying over a nation that’s not only free but fair, not only strong but just. History and reason summon us to embrace love and loyalty—to a citizenship that seeks a better world, calls on those better angels, and fights for better days. What, really, could be more patriotic than that? What, in the end, could be more American?”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“A true patriot salutes the flag but always makes sure it’s flying over a nation that’s not only free but fair, not only strong but just.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“Robert Shelton of The New York Times had reviewed a Greenwich Village performance by a young folk singer, Bob Dylan. “His clothes may need a bit of tailoring,” Shelton wrote of Dylan, “but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano, and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“So much of music builds on prior ideas and themes,”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“The capacity of music to reassure and to remind is one of its cardinal virtues.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“In his literary commonplace book, Jefferson transcribed these lines from a version of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch’d with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treasons, Stratagems, & Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such Man be trusted.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, the Scottish writer and politician Andrew Fletcher brilliantly linked music and civic life, writing, “I knew a very wise man…[ who] believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“History isn’t just something we read; it’s also something we hear. We hear the musketry on the green at Lexington and Concord and the hoofbeats of Paul Revere’s midnight ride. We hear the moans of the wounded and of the dying on the fields of Antietam and of Gettysburg, the quiet clump of the boots of Grant and Lee on the porch steps of Wilmer McLean’s house at Appomattox—and the crack of a pistol at Ford’s Theatre. We hear the cries of the enslaved, the pleas of suffragists, the surf at Omaha Beach. We hear a sonorous president, his voice scratchy on the radio, reassuring us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself; and we hear another president, impossibly young and dashing, his breath white in the inaugural air, telling us to ask not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country. And we hear the whoosh of helicopters in the distant jungles of Southeast Asia and the baritone of a minister, standing before the Lincoln Memorial, telling us about his dream.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“the enslaved “would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“we hear another president, impossibly young and dashing, his breath white in the inaugural air, telling us to ask not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“Life will never be what we want it to be, and the best we can do, in the end, is to endure, seeking love in a fallen world that’s destined to disappoint us.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation