Quotes by Biographers

Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.

Ron Chernow

Books do not perish like humankind. Of course we commonly see them broken in the haberdasher's shop when only a few months before they lay bound on the stationer's stall; these are not true works, but mere trash and newfangleness for the vulgar. There are thousands of such gewgaws and toys which people have in their chambers, or which they keep upon their shelves, believing that they are precious things, when they are the mere passing follies of the passing time and of no more value than papers gathered up from some dunghill or raked by chance out of the kennel. True books are filled with the power of the understanding which is the inheritance of the ages: you may take up a book in time, but you read it in eternity.

Peter Ackroyd

Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt.Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not?And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more.

Peter Ackroyd

We went back into the Mens Apartments where there were others raving of Ships that may fly and silvered Creatures upon the Moon: Their Stories seem to have neither Head nor Tayl to them, Sir Chris. told me, but there is a Grammar in them if I could but Puzzle it out.This is a mad Age, I replied, and there are many fitter for Bedlam than these here confin'd to a Chain or a dark Room.A sad Reflection, Nick.And what little Purpose have we to glory in our Reason, I continu'd, when the Brain may so suddenly be disorder'd?

Peter Ackroyd

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon

Peter Ackroyd

It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.

Scott Elledge

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.

Robert Kanigel

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire.

Peter Ackroyd

It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?""Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

Irving Stone

What we learn in childhood is carved in stone. What we learn as adults is carved in ice.

David Kherdian

Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.

Robert A. Caro

Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

Louis Kronenberger

And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

Plutarch

He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest.

Diogenes Laërtius

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.

Richard Davenport-Hines

Conscience is a treacherous thing and mine behaves badly whenever there is a serious danger of being found out.

Margaret Lane

- Paddle Your Own CanoeVoyager upon life's sea,To yourself be true,And whatever your lot may be,Paddle your own canoe.Never, though the winds may rave,Falter or look back;But upon the darkest waveLeave a shining track.Paddle your own canoe.Nobly dare the wildest storm,Stem the hardest gale,Brave of heart and strong of armYou will never fail.When the world is cold and dark,Keep your aim in view;And toward the beacon work,Paddle your own canoe. .....Would you crush the giant wrong,In the world's free fight?With a spirit brave and strong,Battle for the right.And to break the chains that bindThe many to the fewTo enfranchise slavish mind,-Paddle your own canoe.Nothing great is lightly won,Nothing won is lost,Every good deed, nobly done,Will repay the cost.Leave to Heaven, in humble trust,All you will to do:But if succeed, you mustPaddle your own canoe.

Sarah Knowles Bolton

A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.

Agnes Repplier

There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged.

William Manchester

But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

Jeff Hobbs

He was a victim of his own integrity, which forced him to do his best, even when he would have preferred to do nothing at all.

Irving Stone

We might define an eccentric as a man who is law unto himself and a crank as one who having determined what the law is insists on laying it down to others.

Louis Kronenberger

Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.

Nick Tosches

its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members “could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.

Robert A. Caro

Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and gives them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune...

Plutarch

the much-sought prize of eternal youthIs just arrested growth.

Edgar Lee Masters

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.

Jeff Hobbs

Humor brings insight and tolerance.

Agnes Repplier

So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.

Peter Ackroyd

Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination.

Peter Ackroyd

Prosperity is not just scale adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.

Plutarch

Devise some creed, and live it, beyond theirs,Or I shall think you but their spendthrift heirs.

Edmund Blunden

The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward

Robert A. Caro

There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court—and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki.

Mark Gevisser

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

Richard Davenport-Hines

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

Peter Ackroyd

Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?

Edgar Lee Masters

Jack Kennedy brought an "intense concentration" and a "gently teasing humor" to the dinner table, along with what Katherine Graham called his habit of "vacuum cleaning your brain.

Sally Bedell Smith

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

Peter Ackroyd

... man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...

Plutarch

their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine,

Robert A. Caro

A letter from a French cleric to Nicholas of St. Albans, written c. 1178, rehearsed what was already a familiar perception: Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live. Unsubstantial fantasies slide easily into their minds. They think their dreams to be visions, and their visions to be divine. We cannot blame them, for such is the nature of their land. I have often noticed that the English are greater dreams than the French.

Peter Ackroyd

Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.

Peter Ackroyd

In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: "The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

Edmund Morris

The idea of Christian perfection, which began in the ancient monasteries and spread to the world as an ideal, is one of the most appealing, demanding and ultimately hopeless notions of the spiritual life. By definition, only God is perfect—that is, complete and independent unto [God’s] self. Humans, on the other hand, are radically imperfect, and that, paradoxically, is welcome news, for the recognition of our incompleteness throws us on the mercy of God and enables us, as Saint Paul stressed, to put up with one another’s faults.

Donald Spoto

He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante's Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man's unvarnished verdict of himself?

Irving Stone

What strange perversity is it that induces a man to set his heart on doing those things which he has not succeeded in and makes him slight those in which his achievement has been respectable.

Gamaliel Bradford

At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Richard Davenport-Hines

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Philip Guedalla

Author says that, while Eisenhower had other intellectual mentors, he learned how to lead men from Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was the first American enlisted man to rise to four-star general, and he so identified with those he led that he once invited a sentry out of the rain and gave him his own dry uniform.

Jean Edward Smith

Words will build no walls.

Plutarch

That speech (Daniel Webster's) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.

Robert A. Caro

He who for love hath undergone The worst that can befall Is happier thousandfold than one Who never loved at all.

Richard Monckton Milnes

He was able to sit in silence for long stretches without feeling a need to make small talk.

Charles R. Cross

Rest is the sweet sauce of labour.

Plutarch

Be glad today. Tomorrow may bring tears. Be brave today. The darkest night will pass. And golden rays will usher in the dawn.

Sarah Knowles Bolton

You say that it is time to shake off the Mist, but Mankind walks in a Mist; that Reason which you cry up as the Glory of this Age is a Proteus and Cameleon that changes its Shape almost in every Man: there is no Folly that may not have a thousand Reasons produc'd to advance it into the Class of Wisdom. Reason itself is a Mist.

Peter Ackroyd

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

Judith Thurman

But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practise and exercise. We are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to practice, and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation which we look at, but by the statement of the fact creates a moral purpose which we form.

Plutarch

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

Peter Ackroyd

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