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.
People are so helpful. People will stop what they’re doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works.
It was an utterly phenomenal achievement.
History isn’t just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.
The truth isn’t just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.
My love is to tell a story but I like stories that evolve from character, from the nature of the individuals involved.
May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.
I’m very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down.
You can’t love what you don’t know much about. You can’t convince, stimulate, hold the attention, teach, if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn’t mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.
I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it’s about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.
Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.
I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me – Nathanael Greene.