The American Spirit

Key Takeaways

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Highlights

Roam capture metadata — Author: David McCullough · Reading Status: Books Read · Source: https://medium.com/@kwharrison13/2017-in-books-b2316c63784a · Recommended By: BookBub · Tags: #Books

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• “Why do some men reach for the stars and so many others never even look up?”
• “Sadly, too many today take for granted public schools, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equality before the law, forgetting that these were ever novel and daring ideas.”
• Quoting George Washington’s oath — “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
• Quoting Thomas Jefferson — “It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”
• “I think what most of us want — as most people everywhere want more than anything — is to be useful. This and to feel we belong to something larger than ourselves.”
• “Yes, I am an idealist,” said Woodrow Wilson. “That’s how I know I’m an American.”
• “Read books. Try to understand the reason why things happen, why they are as they are. If you see only the surface phenomena, then the world becomes extremely confusing, ever more unsettling. But if the reasons are understood there’s a kind of simplicity that emerges. Sometimes, somewhere along the line, memorize a poem. Sometime, somewhere along the line, go out in a field and paint a picture, for your own pleasure. Sometime, somewhere along the line, plant a tree, write your mother a letter. And sometime, somewhere along the line, do something for your country.”
• “An astute observer of old wrote that history is philosophy taught with examples.”
• “And read you will. Read for pleasure. Read to enlarge your lives. Read history, read biography, learn from the lives of others. Read Marcus Aurelius and Yeats. Read Cervantes and soon, don’t wait until you’re past fifty as I did. Read Emerson and Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, and Langston Hughes.”
• Quoting Ronald Reagan — “How can we love our country and not love our countrymen? And loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they’re sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory.”
• “We think we live in difficult uncertain times. We think we have worries. We think our leaders face difficult decisions. But so it has nearly always been.”
• “The Massachusetts constitution states that “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” It was the ‘duty’ of the government, Adams wrote, to educate everybody.”
• “For self-government to work, the people must be educated.”
• “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
• “I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading,” Adams wrote as a young man. “I cannot live without books,” Jefferson famously told Adams in their old age.”
• “We have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed.”
• “[Margaret McFarland] said that attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught. If the teacher has enthusiasm for the subject at hand, the student catches that, be it in second grade or graduate school. She said, ‘Show them what you love!’”
• “If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story. That’s human. That calls for empathy on the part of the teller of the story and the reader or listener to the story.”
• “We’re all what we read to a very considerable degree.”
• Quoting John F. Kennedy — “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live.”