George P. A. Healy; I knew no one in France, I was utterly ignorant of the language, I did not know what I should do when once there; but I was not yet one-and-twenty, and I had a great stock of coura...
marinate your mind
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and wit...
Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and trave...
Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had...
Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost-he has lost a whole continent.
We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.
The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.
All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.
[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read o...
It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required - learn vitally anything - by the close study of books.
In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient streng...
Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it...
We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.
The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know...do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.
Paris was a place where one wanted to walk, where to walk—flâner, as the French said—was practically a way of life. (Ah! To wander over Paris! wrote Honoré de Balzac. What an adorable and delectable e...
As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitutio...
According to Adams, Jefferson proposed that he, Adams, do the writing [pf the Declaration of Independence], but that he declined, telling Jefferson he must do it.Why? Jefferson asked, as Adams would r...
I've always been dissatisfied, I know that. But lately I find that I reek of discontentment. It fills my throat, and it floods my brain. And sometimes I fear there is no longer a dream, but only the d...