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No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.
Jon Meacham
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Jon Meacham
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 20
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Chattanooga
Tennessee
Jon Ellis Meacham
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More quotes by Jon Meacham
In America, now, let us - Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, wiccan, whatever - fight nativism with the same strength and conviction that we fight terrorism. My faith calls on its followers to love one's enemies. A tall order, that - perhaps the tallest of all.
Jon Meacham
An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.
Jon Meacham
I don't think anyone is qualified to answer questions of eternal fate definitively, much less pinpoint it to a given day.
Jon Meacham
Sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.
Jon Meacham
As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom - not least freedom of conscience.
Jon Meacham
America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the broad, sun-lit uplands.
Jon Meacham
Whenever there is news of a terrible shooting, I wonder why America has so miserably failed to enact even common-sense gun legislation.
Jon Meacham
The Occupy Wall Street protests at last suggest that America's wealth gap is once again becoming an organizing political principle in the country.
Jon Meacham
It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.
Jon Meacham
Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.
Jon Meacham
Among the many problems with taking the Bible literally is it reduces the most mysterious and complex of realities to simple - even simplistic - terms. Yes, scripture speaks of fire and damnation and eternal bliss, but the Bible is the product of human hands and hearts, and much of the imagery is allegorical, not meteorological.
Jon Meacham
I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.
Jon Meacham
While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing - good for our political culture.
Jon Meacham
Without education, we are weaker economically. Without economic power, we are weaker in terms of national security. No great military power has ever remained so without great economic power.
Jon Meacham
Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.
Jon Meacham
Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
Jon Meacham
One of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence - he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers.
Jon Meacham
The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.
Jon Meacham
One wonders whether the Obama re-election campaign may be on the right track as it seeks to apply the you-break-it-you-own-it rule to Bush and the American economy. Hardly a day goes by without President Obama or his surrogates arguing that it takes longer than four years to recover from an economic crisis so long in the making.
Jon Meacham
The way to put oneself in a position to take the harder, more honorable political path is to argue for one's virtues in a vigorous way.
Jon Meacham
