Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I am all for charity in judging the men who have occupied the Oval Office over the past seventy years, given the huge responsibilities the president carries across the world. "
Nigel Hamilton
I Am
Charity
Judging
Related Quotes:
" Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before. "
Nigel Hamilton
Two
Policy
Surrender
" Regularly, customers asked for a book on Greenwich, and there was none. After all, Elizabeth I was born there. The Observatory is known all over the world; the Royal Naval College is there. So I decided to do it. "
Nigel Hamilton
World
Born
Royal
" My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so. "
Nigel Hamilton
School
War
Father
" In my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun. "
Nigel Hamilton
Group
Boston
Forgive
" Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species. "
Nigel Hamilton
Ways
Survival
Most
" Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness and gratitude. "
Nigel Hamilton
Time
Thanksgiving
Gratitude
" My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster. "
Nigel Hamilton
Battle
Army
Who
" That's the miracle of Amazon! It's like Internet dating. In the early days, you could get slimed as an author on Amazon by someone bearing a grudge, or jealous, or whatever. And because there were so few reviews posted, this stank. "
Nigel Hamilton
Internet
Early
You
" In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms. "
Nigel Hamilton
Rose
Parents
Myself
" To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it. "
Nigel Hamilton
Massage
Media
News
" The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf. "
Nigel Hamilton
War
Story
History
" I'm not promising to write 'JFK 2' - but one day, I might! "
Nigel Hamilton
Promising
Day
Might
" For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction. "
Nigel Hamilton
Story
Facts
History
" Both JFK and George W. Bush were the sons of wealthy U.S. ambassadors and thus privileged to meet distinguished figures, to travel, and to see the world and think about its problems if they chose. "
Nigel Hamilton
Travel
Meet
Problems
" We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed. "
Nigel Hamilton
Empathy
Compassion
Work
" Since his inauguration in 2009, President Obama has upheld FDR's vision of America as a nation that keeps its word - a nation still committed to uphold the 'four freedoms' that President Roosevelt set down in the great Atlantic Charter of August 1941. "
Nigel Hamilton
America
Vision
Nation
" I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice. "
Nigel Hamilton
Fabric
Become
Social
" I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful. "
Nigel Hamilton
Doctor
Daily
Famous
" After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London. "
Nigel Hamilton
Taught
University
London
" The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution - even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher's strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary. "
Nigel Hamilton
Time
Moral
Solution
" I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler? "
Nigel Hamilton
Group
Daily
Face
" Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse! "
Nigel Hamilton
Respect
World
Time
" Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy. "
Nigel Hamilton
Determination
I Am
Time
" In daring to re-tell the stories of the last twelve American presidents, both public and private, I knew I would incur some outrage with 'American Caesars.' "
Nigel Hamilton
Some
American
Daring
" I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War. "
Nigel Hamilton
American
Painting
War
" As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair. "
Nigel Hamilton
Great
Student
Most
" Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign. "
Nigel Hamilton
Great
Down
World
" President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages. "
Nigel Hamilton
Iran
He
President
" President Gerald Ford was no intellectual, but he had served with distinction in combat as a naval gunnery officer and then as Congressman for a quarter century. "
Nigel Hamilton
Quarter
Intellectual
Combat
" It must have been the fall of 1952 when my father returned to London sporting a neck tie emblazoned with the words 'I Like Ike.' "
Nigel Hamilton
Words
London
Tie