Richard Brookhiser Quotes

Dominance can be a tempration to division. "There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln loved other people's jokes as much as his own.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.
Richard Brookhiser
Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.
Richard Brookhiser
She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.
Richard Brookhiser
The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.
Richard Brookhiser
Most principles are limp until they are tested.
Richard Brookhiser
It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.
Richard Brookhiser
As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.
Richard Brookhiser
Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.
Richard Brookhiser
Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.
Richard Brookhiser
One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.
Richard Brookhiser
Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.
Richard Brookhiser
Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.
Richard Brookhiser
She became at once more intimate and more exalted.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln Road that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, "takes them unawares." The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty. Lincoln wrote that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, "takes them unawares." The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty.
Richard Brookhiser
God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.
Richard Brookhiser
Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.
Richard Brookhiser
To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.
Richard Brookhiser
Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.
Richard Brookhiser
A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.
Richard Brookhiser
Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.
Richard Brookhiser
The towering genius is not apolitical.
Richard Brookhiser
He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.
Richard Brookhiser