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" I am a southerner who grew up with and around guns. I own some still. My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10. "
Jon Meacham
Own
Guns
Father
Related Quotes:
" With the perspective afforded by the passage of time, where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families, innocents going about their lives, suddenly and brutally murdered, no other day can ever matter as much. "
Jon Meacham
Day
Time
Perspective
" Scripture is not inerrant; believers are called to interpret biblical texts in light of tradition and reason. "
Jon Meacham
Reason
Light
Tradition
" The more we can do to support and promulgate the intellectual traditions of the Abrahamic faiths - of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - the better armed we will be to fight fundamentalism. "
Jon Meacham
Intellectual
Support
Fight
" A globalized world is by now a familiar fact of life. Building walls or moats may sound appealing, but the future belongs to those who tend to their people and then boldly engage the rest of the world, near and far. "
Jon Meacham
Future
World
Walls
" Attacks on a politician's identity - questioning Romney's religion, say, or Obama's birthplace - tend to come when an opponent is desperate and can't sell himself. "
Jon Meacham
Sell
Religion
Opponent
" We are now living in a post-Roosevelt, post-Reagan universe. What comes next will not be post-partisan, because faction is an intrinsic human impulse. "
Jon Meacham
Human
Living
Now
" It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country. "
Jon Meacham
Politics
Work
White
" Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith. "
Jon Meacham
Doubt
History
Belief
" I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt's, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans - but he was also a cold-blooded politician. "
Jon Meacham
Good
I Am
Done
" Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment. "
Jon Meacham
Press
World
Inspiration
" Barack Obama is many things; among them, he is a tough and even ferocious political warrior. "
Jon Meacham
Warrior
Things
Tough
" The attacks of September 11 - and subsequent acts of terror from London to Madrid to Fort Hood, Texas - embody the most repulsive of human instincts, the will to power at the price of the lives of others. "
Jon Meacham
Human
Others
Power
" The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much. "
Jon Meacham
American Dream
American
Challenges
" Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn't work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won't work for you either. "
Jon Meacham
You
War
World
" The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school. "
Jon Meacham
School
Prayer
Failure
" The central tenet of Christianity as it has come down to us is that we are to reach out when our instinct is to pull inward; to give when we want to take; to love when we are inclined to hate; to include when are tempted to exclude. "
Jon Meacham
Love
Want
Reach
" If a person is homosexual by nature - that is, if one's sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one's identity as gender or skin color - then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow. "
Jon Meacham
Gender
Society
Nature
" As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs. "
Jon Meacham
People
Police
Fire
" Only the most unapologetic biblical fundamentalists, for instance, take every biblical injunction literally. If we all took all scripture at the same level of authority, then we would be more open to slavery, to the subjugation of women, to wider use of stoning. Jesus himself spoke out frequently against divorce in the strongest of terms. "
Jon Meacham
Women
Open
Slavery
" A lot of people, including business leaders, think the future belongs to China. Globalization is not a zero-sum game, but we need to hone our skills to stay in play. "
Jon Meacham
Game
Business
Future
" One wonders whether the Obama re-election campaign may be on the right track as it seeks to apply the you-break-it-you-own-it rule to Bush and the American economy. Hardly a day goes by without President Obama or his surrogates arguing that it takes longer than four years to recover from an economic crisis so long in the making. "
Jon Meacham
Crisis
Day
American
" World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man. "
Jon Meacham
Depression
Man
History
" Whether one believes or not, religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics, and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive, it remains vital, inspiring great good and, sometimes, great evil. "
Jon Meacham
Politics
Best
Evil
" The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life. "
Jon Meacham
Help
America
Fall
" Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot. "
Jon Meacham
Same
Say
More
" Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires. "
Jon Meacham
Life
Think
Supreme Court
" President Obama is now losing to 'Republican Nominee' in polls - no name needed. "
Jon Meacham
Name
Losing
Republican
" The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness. "
Jon Meacham
Serious
More
Past
" I believe that my children, who are young, will look back on the early years of the 21st century in rather the same way I look back on the middle of the 20th: as a time when seemingly respectable people supported discrimination against Americans simply because those Americans were different from themselves. "
Jon Meacham
Children
Believe
Time
" In America, now, let us - Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, wiccan, whatever - fight nativism with the same strength and conviction that we fight terrorism. My faith calls on its followers to love one's enemies. A tall order, that - perhaps the tallest of all. "
Jon Meacham
Strength
America
Fight