Simon Cameron: “I loved my brother, as only the poor and lonely can love those with whom they have toiled and struggled up the rugged hill of life’s success – but he died bravely in the discharge of his duty.
Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party – including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.
I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.
Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril;.
Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: “He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.
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” against one another.
When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause.
THE SUMMER OF 1863 marked a crucial transformation in the Union war effort – the organization and deployment of black regiments that would eventually amount to 180,000 soldiers, a substantial proportion of eligible black males.
Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.
I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.
Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.
That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.
The turn of the century was the age of the banker, so much so that the leading bankers of the day had become legendary figures in the public imagination-vast, overshadowing behemoths whose colossal power seemed to reach everywhere.
My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.