There are points of likeness in the seminal disasters that befell both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt in the early stages of their careers. Both crucibles were precipitated by a combination of...
There I go When my heart all worn by grief Sinketh low. Where my baseless hopes do lie There to find my peace, go I. Sad and slow . .
The young man never seemed to know what idleness was, marveled Cutler, and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.
The surest way to be happy, Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, is to seek happiness for others.
The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.
The politician, Johnson’s experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justifica...
The painful apprehension within the administration mirrored the fears experienced in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the country.
The mossy marbles rest On lips that he has prest In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb. Yet, beyond sharing
The hand Wilson extended when the two men first met felt like a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper—irresponsive and lifeless.
The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the bully pulpit, a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to...
The American people, Johnson continued, are tired of wrecking crews. They want builders—people who construct. They will entrust their affairs to the party that is constructive.
The American people, Johnson continued, are tired of wrecking crews. They want builders—people who construct. They will entrust their affairs to the party that is constructive. They will turn their ba...
That was my first lesson in real politics. . . . If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be...
Testing his image in Hartford, he would refine it further in subsequent speeches. If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, Lincoln began, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and k...
Seward’s only hope for reelection lay in Weed’s ability to cobble together an antislavery majority from among the various discordant elements in the state legislature. In the weeks before the legislat...
Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important t...
Roosevelt’s revulsion at Tolstoy’s infantile, pathetic, endearing bon vivant—his categorical interpretation of healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships—reveals a deep-seated disgust with p...
Roosevelt had defined the public interest in the previously private struggle between labor and capital.
Regardless of one’s impressive title, power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes....