People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.

He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.

There is a sense of feeling larger than your own life when you're in some common mission together. You have to hope it's not going to take a war to bring that back to America again. I think another time when it seemed to be here was in the early 1960s.

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.

(from John Hay's diary) “The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.

Years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement [Lyndon Johnson] could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.