To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.
Time is the most valuable thing you have; be sure you spend it well
This was no dictator or Messiah holding forth. Franklin Roosevelt spoke in the name of the people for a resurgence of the strength of democracy, for a constitutional system capable of meeting every st...
There will be some one at the White House whom you will like more than me, Roosevelt had predicted during his final meeting with the press corps, but not one who will interest you more.
The vice presidency ought to be abolished, he told his friend Leonard Wood. The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.
The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature...
The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.
Such men of towering egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people’s best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots.
Shortly before she left for New York, she received an unwelcome present from South Carolina—a painting depicting Lincoln with a rope around his neck, his feet chained and his body adorned with tar and...
Roosevelt had defined the public interest in the previously private struggle between labor and capital.
Refuse to let past resentments fester; transcend personal vendettas.
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.
My reading was always a kind of living, he explained later, a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come...
In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, he began, you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward. Bunyan’s muckraker, he suggested, typifies the man w...
Hearst’s papers and magazines were his intended target and promised his speech would clarify that he abhorred the whitewash brush quite as much as of mud slinging.
Eleanor had defended over the years, that the money spent on arms would be much better spent on education and medical care.
Attempting to circumvent this declaration, Hunter recalled that Charles I of England had entered repeatedly into arrangements with his adversaries despite ongoing hostilities. I do not profess to be p...
What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?
We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have.
Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of his...