His Truth Is Marching On Quotes

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in a phrase drawn from the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Bends, not swerves—but what we can miss in this cold-eyed understanding of history is that the arc won’t even bend without devoted Americans pressing for the swerve.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress—our progress—would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“In the charged and complicated spheres of identity, politics, philosophy, and power in America, though, racism was not situational but systemic.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Preparing for the Kingdom of God meant making the world as like unto that Kingdom as possible, and the Kingdom was to be a new reality of restoration, redemption, renewal, and resurrection”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“When the nation sees differently, it enhances its capacity to act differently. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, America has gradually expanded who’s included when the country speaks of “We the People.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one house—not just the house of black and white, but the house of the South, the house of America,”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“We truly believed that we were on God’s side, and in spite of everything—the beatings, the bombings, the burnings—God’s truth would prevail,” Lewis recalled. The anguish and the duration of the struggle was, in a way, a vindication of the premise of the struggle itself—that this was the ultimate battle to bring light to darkness no matter how often darkness prevailed.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“At times in its history, Christianity has been an instrument of repression. In our living memory, however, it has also been deployed as a means of liberation and progress.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Costly grace…is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep for fear that I will wake up and our democracy will be gone and never return.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“A young person should be speaking out for what is fair, what is just, what is right. Speak out for those who have been left out and left behind. That is how the movement goes on.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“In the middle of the last century, Lewis marched into the line of fire to summon a nation to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. Arrested forty-five times over the course of his life, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed. He led by example more than by words. He was a peaceful soldier in the cause of a religiously inspired understanding of humanity and of America. And he bent history to his will—though he would insist the important thing was not his will, but God’s.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Now as then, the tradition of faith that drove Lewis is too often used not to pursue justice but to amass power. Now as then, many white Americans profess to believe the gospel. And now as then, too many are content to accede to religious teachings more in principle than in practice. My aim is to show how John Lewis did both—and if he did both, then perhaps more of us can, too.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nonviolent pacifist organization founded during World War I. Its members and leaders had included Jane Addams and Norman Thomas; its message was the possibility of bringing an unruly world into good order through acts of conscience. As Lawson was to put it, “Nonviolent revolution is always a real, serious revolution. It seeks to transform human life in both private and public forms… involves the whole man in his whole existence… maintains balance between tearing down and building up, destroying and planting.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“The message of the civil rights movement was straightforward, and it was a message grounded in hope: We are one people; we are one family; we all live in the same house—the American house, the world house.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“The lesson of Lewis was that sustained personal witness to injustice, borne in the public arena where opinions are shaped, laws enacted, and reality changed, is vital. “John’s”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“In his closing remarks, King spoke from a mountaintop, a prophet bringing word from on high. Lewis spoke more simply, from the valley, among the people whose burdens he knew because they were his burdens too.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom,” King wrote, “is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Historians of the twenty-first century,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “will no doubt struggle to explain how nine-tenths of the American people, priding themselves every day on their kindliness, their generosity, their historic consecration to the rights of man, could so long have connived in the systematic dehumanization of the remaining tenth—and could have done so without not just a second but hardly a first thought.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“As Thoreau wrote in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” “Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“National coverage of Lewis’s falling-out with SNCC over Black Power was rooted in a white perspective. White Power had been acceptable since Jamestown. Now even the hint of Black Power was denounced as un-American. Citing the Times headline LEWIS QUITS S.N.C.C.; SHUNS BLACK POWER, Good observed, “The headline’s partial truths fitted the rationale of a white society that had tolerated racial injustice for a century, yet denounced ‘black power’ in a day. At the same time, some in the society were paying sentimental homage to the good old days when Negroes faced fire hoses and police dogs with beatific smiles.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows,”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“It was, instead, about urging African Americans to draw on the traditions of the American Revolution to battle state-sanctioned white supremacy in order to claim their rightful place as citizens.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“The biblical imagery is part of the American tradition, no matter what your personal beliefs are. The Old Testament, the New Testament, it is all woven into who we are, Christian, Jew, or whatever. Religious metaphors and religious language form a kind of common bond in America—you can think of it either in literal or literary terms. Even if you are basically secular, the ideals and principles that come out of religion are essentially what we all should share: what is the right thing to do, what is just, what is fair.
(Page 203)”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“For many Americans, especially non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality can be a useful guide to much of anything is risible, particularly since so many white evangelicals from 2016 forward chose to throw in their lot with a solipsistic American president who bullies, boasts, and sneers. Yet Lewis’s life suggests that religiously inspired activism may hold one of the best hopes for those who aim to make the life of the nation more just.
(Page 10)”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“The history of the twentieth century would be nobler if we could say that the march on Washington was in real time what it has become in retrospect, a clear turning point that brought white America to the recognition that as King had said it was time to include all, not just some, in the Jeffersonian creed of liberty.”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope