If I wasn’t busy,” she replied, “I’d go crazy.
Nevertheless, no other speech proved “so effective, none so full of character and none which found so responsive an audience. It carried everything before it, and old campaigners sighed that such energy was beyond them.
While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body.
The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements “one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores” on the city of New York. Realizing.
A thought to God is the right way to start off my Administration,” he told them. “It will be the means to bring us out of the depths of despair.
In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memory – the ease and capacity with which the mind stores information – is generally considered an inborn trait.
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.
Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” But, he famously asserted, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
The domestic scene,” she admitted, referring not only to the coal dispute but to a rash of racial disturbances that had recently broken out, “is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.
Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people’s lives? What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?
By the time they were in their late twenties, all four young men knew that they were leaders. In public service, they had found a calling. They had chosen to stand before the people and ask for their support, to make themselves vulnerable.
The painful apprehension within the administration mirrored the fears experienced in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the country.
Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” Johnson liked to say. “It is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation.
White vividly recalled sitting “pop-eyed with wonder” at the edge of his chair while Roosevelt spoke “with a kind of dynamic, burning candor” about his plans.
Johnson saw preoccupation with principle and procedure as a sign of impotence. Such men were “troublemakers,” more concerned with appearing forceful than in exercising the real strengths that led to tangible achievement.
Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt “the greatest of companions.” Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.
Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.
When I read aloud,” Lincoln later explained, “two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.
If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it.
The politician, Johnson’s experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.