Robert Dallek Quotes

Messrs. Washington and Lincoln faced enormous difficulties, but they both gave their lives to make sure America survived.

Americans are good with to-do lists; just tell us what to do, and we'll do it. Throughout our history, we have proven that. Colonize. Check. Win our independence. Check. Form a union. Check. Expand to the Pacific. Check. Settle the West. Check. Keep the Union together. Check. Industrialize. Check. Fight the Nazis. Check.

President Lincoln chose to fight a bloody and unpopular war because he believed the enemy had to be defeated. He was right.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

If that was good enough for George Washington, it's good enough for me.

We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none - including President Lincoln.

Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

Millions of Americans cannot tell you who lived at Mount Vernon or who wrote the Declaration of Independence - let alone the Emancipation Proclamation. But they know that to be 'a Benedict Arnold' is to be a traitor of the deepest dye - someone who coldly betrays not only a sacred cause but every moral scruple along the way.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War - when I really think about them, they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.

The present Administration had no alternative but to accept the war initiated by South Carolina or the Southern Confederacy. The North will sustain the Administration almost to a man, and it ought to sustain it at all hazards.

Let cannon and bell at high noon call the people from sport or study or toil, to reflection on that great life so nobly lived. Let the universal display from tenement to State House of the flag of the United States of America remind the people that our country is the United States because of Abraham Lincoln.

My father's political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.

Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence - as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.

Lincoln prevailed: wearing his green shawl in the White House and gripped with melancholy, his feet constantly cold, he preserved a nation that had begun to unravel, often holding it together with nothing more than the flat of his hand and his unfaltering sense of human worth.

If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be turning over in his grave.

If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term.

If the Founding Fathers and other patriots who fought during the Revolutionary War could see the United States today, I believe they would be proud of the path that the thirteen colonies, now fifty strong states, have taken since then.

I have always been thankful that so many of our country's greatest leaders and statesmen were able to be on this earth at the same time and place to draft the Constitution.

Franklin Roosevelt was a great leader. He saw how to use the levers of power to affect change.

We are a resilient country. We've been through a Civil War; we've been through two World Wars. We've been through a Great Depression; we even made it through Jimmy Carter! We will make it through the Obama years!

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.

My feeling about him is that the America that we have today, the freedoms we enjoy and the privileges we have, are really the reflection of Abe Lincoln's convictions, his vision, and his toughness.