Ron Chernow Quotes

Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Statesmen are judged by history beyond contemporary debates.

When we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution ... we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in what was said a hundred years ago.

Not enough people really think about the founding of our country, how it all began and what its really about. They don't even teach it in schools any more.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

I don't know how you talk about the founding of America, and what became of the United States, without talking about religious doctrine.

When you're driving into D.C. as a young kid and you go over the Key Bridge and see the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Capitol Building, they become a part of the landscape for you. You are also constantly in contact with this idea that history, and the people that made it, are being remembered.

In America, we may acknowledge Washington and Lincoln as great men, and probably Franklin and Jefferson and maybe Franklin Delano Roosevelt and possibly even several more, but we would probably disagree about precisely what it was that made them great, what it was that enabled them to give a lasting direction to the course of events.

Posterity is something I'm a big fan of because that's how you leave your legacy. Not to sound pompous, but just to be truthful.

The great thing about America is that people take its history and mythologise it.

We say, that the Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God.

I don't think about my legacy, if indeed, I have one.

If the American people don't love me, their descendants will.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

The Declaration of Independence is a sacred part of American history.

Are we a Christian nation now? It's doubtful. But did we start out as one? Without question.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

I'm never looking at life in terms of legacy.

With sincere modesty, if there is such a thing, I have never thought of legacy at all. I am always grateful if people like what I have done. A legacy is something no one can forsee.

For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

When I'm asked about legacy, I say it's too early to talk about legacy.

All that is noble in the world's past history, and especially the minds of the great and the good, are never lost.

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.