America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity.
Freedom is found through the portals of our nation’s libraries.
We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system.
We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history. If we don’t know who we are, if we don’t know how we became what we are, we’re going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.
To this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
The preparations were elaborate and mammoth in scale, and Washington threw himself into the effort, demanding that not an hour be lost.
Washington was a man of exceptional, almost excessive self-command, rarely permitting himself any show of discouragement or despair.
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
However little television you watch, watch less.
It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.
How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don’t know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?
Yes, this is a dangerous time. Yes, this is a time full of shadows and fear. But we have been through worse before and we have faced more difficult days before. We have shown courage and determination, and skillful and inventive and courageous and committed responses to crisis before.
A leader must look and act the part.
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
There are no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as Americans.
Find something to do that you love because then the work itself is always the reward not the recompense. And if you love what you’re doing you probably do better at it than doing something you don’t love and therefore you’ll be compensated appropriately.
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 discontentment.
My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. Its about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. Its about Washington and the army and the war. Its the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.
To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.
With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right – it does look like that.