Richard Brookhiser Quotes

Libertarians are believers in small government who really mean it -- no excuses, no exceptions. [For Libertarians], the excesses of government are their best recruiters.

Depression manifests itself in a lack of will.

The Dutch practice euthanasia so briskly that they will kill themselves even before the Islamists get around to it.

Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries.

Routine is supposed to be the great deadener of souls; how much worse is the half-completed task, the broken round, the unfulfilled routine?

Aaron Burr was like a new refrigerator. He was bright, cold and empty.

[Washington had won] a war for independence and then gone home. [He embodied] the legend of the Roman who returned to his plow after saving his country.

Madison loathed Hamilton and loved Jefferson above all.

Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster round them.

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.

Madison lived in his head and public speaking did not come naturally to him.

Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.

Dominance can be a tempration to division. "There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.

Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.

Lincoln loved other people's jokes as much as his own.

Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.

The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.

She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.

Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.

Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.

Most principles are limp until they are tested.

Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.

The towering genius is not apolitical.

He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.

Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.

To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.

Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.

She became at once more intimate and more exalted.

Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.

One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.

Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.

As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.

Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

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.

Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix.