Roosevelt and Root deputized Taft to inform the Holy See that the United States would purchase the lands for a fair price so long as the hated friars never returned to the archipelago. The land would...
Nothing so extraordinary has ever happened in American politics, a dazed Harold Ickes wrote. Here was a man—a Democrat until a couple of years ago—who, without any organization went into a Republican...
Moreover, he objected, I have never done an official act with a view to promote my own personal aggrandizement, and I don’t like to begin now.
Lincoln was the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in pre...
Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his d...
Largely to gain Nellie’s approbation, Will began to carry a book as a matter of course. Trollope is a great favorite of mine because of the realistic every day tone which one finds in every line he wr...
It’s a bully speech, encouraged Roosevelt in reply.
In less than half a dozen years, seemingly from nothing and from nowhere, he had risen to become a respected leader in the state legislature, a central figure in the fight for internal improvements, a...
If defeat is an orphan, the old saying goes, victory has a thousand fathers,
If the problems created by the industrial age were left unattended, Roosevelt cautioned, America would eventually be sundered by those dreadful lines of division that set the haves and the have-nots a...
If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore the fellow feeling, mutual respect,...
I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that,
He would blanket someone with generosity, care, and affection, but in recompense, expect total loyalty and sterling achievement. Failing this standard was perceived by him as a betrayal. His affection...
He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any per...
He sought the knowledge—not easily accessible—of who had the power of decision over the particular matter in question, and, the source of authority identified, by what means influence could be exerted...
Get the books, and read and study them, he told a law student seeking advice two decades later. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.
Get the books, and read and study them, he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the...
Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband’s passion for politics and worldly achievement surpass...
For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a...
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition, he wrote. I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.