Jaimee > Jaimee's Quotes

“You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists;”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“To know what has come before is to be armed against despair. If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward that most enchanting and elusive of destinations: a more perfect Union.
To do so requires innumerable acts of citizenship and private grace. It will require, as it has in the past, the witness and the bravery of reformers who hold no office and who have no traditional power but who yearn for a better, freer way of life. And will also require, I believe, a president of the United States with a temperamental disposition to speak to the country's hopes rather than to its fears.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”
― Ruth Hurmence Green