Tag Archives: speech

We Don’t Carry the Burden of Disliking One Another

14 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by in Politics, Speeches

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Mitt Romney

“We have very fundamental and sound principles that guide both the president and me. He and I, of course, both feel the pressures and tensions of a close contest. It would be easy to let a healthy competition give way to the personal and the petty. But fortunately we don’t carry the burden of disliking one another.

Barack has had some very fine and gracious moments. Don’t tell anyone I said so, but our 44th president has many gifts, and a beautiful family that would make any man proud.

In our country, you can oppose someone in politics and make a confident case against their policies without any ill will. And that’s how it is for me: there’s more to life than politics. […]

At the Archdiocese of New York, you show this in the work you do, in causes that run deeper than allegiance to party or any contest at the moment. No matter which way the winds are blowing… you answer with calm and willing hearts in service to the poor and care for the sick, in defense of the rights of conscience and in solidarity with the innocent child waiting to be born. You strive to bring God’s love into every life.

I don’t presume to have all your support… and I’m certainly not going ask for it. But you can be certain that in the great causes of compassion that you come together to embrace, I stand proudly with you as an ally and friend.”

__________

From Mitt Romney’s speech at the famous Al Smith dinner, given around this time four years ago.

So much to like here. Though I didn’t vote for Mitt in the election — and wrote here and there why I decided not to — I admire the guy and, four years later, think he would have made a very fine president. I especially like how much of a gentleman he is — that he consistently brings value to the communities and organizations he’s led while never succumbing to pressure to take the sleazy way out. When a challenge arises, answer with a calm and willing heart.

You can watch the (very funny) 2012 Al Smith dinner below.

Images courtesy of Vice and Wiki

More:

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama

Advertisements

Mark Steyn: A Joke Is a Small Thing, but It’s Our Societal Glue

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Mark Steyn: A Joke Is a Small Thing, but It’s Our Societal Glue

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

12 Dead In French Magazine Shooting

“You know, a cartoon is a small thing. It’s not The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

It’s not a big work. People get a pencil, they do a little sketch, and it’s in the paper the next day, and they forget about it. It’s a funny thing. It makes you laugh.

And the joke is an important signifier of society. A joke is a small thing, but it’s part of the societal glue. It’s what holds us together. Jokes are about recognition. When you tell a joke, people understand the social norms that are being mocked in it…

Now we live in a world though, where they don’t just end your career. These people are so serious about jokes — cartoons, gags — that they want to kill you for it.

And the correct attitude of all those people who intervened, all the politicians who spoke up and said ‘I deplore the offense that was given by this cartoon’ is completely wrong.

You should just say, ‘Look, we’re in a free society and we don’t regulate jokes here.’ […]

My friend Ezra Levant once observed that one day the Danish cartoon crisis would be seen as a more critical event than the attacks of September 11th.

He was wrong, obviously, in terms of the comparative death tolls, but he was absolutely right in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization in the 21st century.

In the long run, the ostensibly trivial matter of some not-terribly-good drawings in an obscure newspaper… will prove to be a more important signifier of the collapse of Western civilization than a direct, violent assault on the citadels of American power in Washington and New York.

Because if you provoke on the scale of 9/11, even Western civilization in its present decayed state will feel obliged to respond.

So yes, if they blow up St. Peters, if they blow up the Eiffel Tower, then yes, they’ll get a response.

But the cartoon crisis confirmed to our enemies that at heart we don’t really believe in ourselves anymore. That we won’t defend our core liberties, and that you can steal them from us one little bit at a time.”

__________

Pulled from the inimitable Mark Steyn’s recent speech in Copenhagen to mark the decade anniversary of the Danish cartoon crisis. As a wise man recently noted, “It used to be that they came for the Jews first. Now it’s the cartoonists. Then the Jews.” Quite surreal, that.

I highly encourage you to check out Steyn’s speech below (and buy Charb’s newly minted, posthumously published book). Steyn is a truly first rate orator. If the pulled text gives you the sense that this is another dour, Doomsday-Is-Here rant about Western Civilization’s imminent collapse, then it’s giving off the wrong impression. Steyn is utterly hilarious, astonishingly articulate, and always fun to listen to. I think he’s the best raconteur and pure talker out there since Hitchens passed. For a sample, you can start here. Also, you can keep up with his daily output of writing — mostly on this topic, though also about his jazz cat album — at his website, steynonline.com.

Continue on:

How Jesus Talked

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Religion, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on How Jesus Talked

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew-Caravaggo_(1599-1600)

“Biblical Hebrew developed as a desert language, and it exhibits the economy of desert people. The very opposite of Victorian English, which never uses fewer words if it can use more, Hebrew will not use three words if two will do. It will not use two words if one will do. If it can get away with silence instead of words, it will do so — and much of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is to be found in its silences. This is because in the desert every movement is dehydrating; and desert people learn to think before they move and think before they speak. They are elegant conservers of energy.

When Amos, the great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, tries to move the people to abandon their trivial pursuit of economic status and to take account of the poor, he says most beautifully:

Ve-yigal ka-maim mishpat, ve-tsedaka k’nachal eytahn,

which I would translate, ‘Let your justice flow like water, and your compassion like a never-failing stream.’ The English takes twenty syllables, the Hebrew only fifteen — and this is Hebrew at its most expansive…

If the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life, no one brings on attacks of reverence more often than Jesus, who was actually humorous, affectionate, and down-to-earth, who spoke to his friends and followers in a clear and bracing manner, was often blunt, sometimes vulgar, and always arresting. Never did he employ the dreary, self-righteous, even priggish sound that some of his admirers would wish for him. Despite the popularity of the King James Version, Jesus was not a 17th-century Englishman…

In Mark’s Gospel, the most primitive of the four gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks are: ‘The Time has come. The Kingdom of God draws near…’ The next word is almost always translated as ‘repent’ or ‘convert’ — which makes Jesus sound like a sidewalk freak with a placard in his hands. But the word Mark uses is metanoiete, which means literally in Greek ‘change your minds.’ For the Greeks, the mind was considerably more than it is for us. It was the core of the person, the center of his being. The word we would use is ‘heart.’ So… I have translated the Greek as ‘Open your hearts’ — a far cry from ‘repent!'”

__________

Excerpted from Thomas Cahill’s speech “Close Encounters with the People of the Past”.

Cahill, who has written some of the most enjoyable and broadly accessible popular history out there, has published a few books that hover around the ancient Greeks and early Christian church. I recommend starting with Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

The image: a section of Caravaggio’s 1599 masterpiece The Calling of Saint Matthew.

Related reading:

What Is Mein Kampf about?

12 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by in History

≈ Comments Off on What Is Mein Kampf about?

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Adolf Hitler in Color

“Mein Kampf is fundamentally a text about nature. About what belongs in nature and what doesn’t belong in nature.

It describes nature as a conflict of races; everything else is incidental. The only things which truly exists in the human world are races, and the only thing they’re supposed to be doing is competing for land and resources.

In this text, the Jews figure not as a race — not as an inferior race, not as a superior race — but as something totally supernatural which has somehow come into the world and introduced evil.

The Jews have an ability which is, in effect, superhuman. They can do one thing that no one else can do, and that’s bring ways of thinking into the world.

So from Hitler’s point of view, the Jews are not actually subhuman. They’re more like superhuman, though that’s not quite right either. From Hitler’s point of view, and from the point of view of several leading Nazis, the Jews are not really human at all. They’re para-human: they only appear to be human, but are actually something else.

The evil that the Jews have introduced into the world — and this strikes me as very important — is ethical thinking. What the Jews have done which is so wrong, is to confuse our minds by introducing ideas which are not about racial struggle. They’ve introduced ethical life to the world.

So Hitler presents capitalism as Jewish; he presents communism as Jewish; he presents Christianity as Jewish.

Why? Because all of these ideas, different though they might seem, have the common feature that they allow people to see each other in non-racial terms. Whether I’m signing a contract with you, making a revolution with you, attending mass with you, it’s not race that matters. It’s some kind of other reciprocity.

Therefore Hitler could say, as he did say, that Saint Paul was basically the same person as Leon Trotsky…

Nature can only be pure if the Jews are gone, because Jews are the special, supernatural beings who make us something that we’re not.”

__________

Timothy Snyder, speaking in Krakow at the “Unimaginable” conference earlier this year. (He also touches on these themes around minute 20 in this 2013 talk at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.)

Snyder, who teaches history at Yale, has a new book out, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Writing. I can highly recommend not only his talks like the one above, but his written work, which is dynamic and crisp, and shows a true mastering of the broad political, cultural, and military forces of the early 20th century. His last effort, the highly acclaimed, subversive history of the second world war Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, has a place at the top of my shelf.

To get a condensed version of Snyder’s take on the ideology of the Reich, you can check out his article soon to be published in the New York Review of Books, “Hitler’s World”. In it, he gives depth to some of the concepts detailed above (Snyder has clearly been fixated on the project of clearing up Hitlerite ideology for some time). The following slice is among the most informative of the piece, and it lays bare the claims of those on both sides of the religious-atheist debate who try to claim the Führer as their opponents’ ally:

Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”

Continue on topic:

Timothy Snyder

David Brooks: What Do We Mean When We Say Someone’s “Deep”?

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in Speeches

≈ Comments Off on David Brooks: What Do We Mean When We Say Someone’s “Deep”?

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

David Brooks

“I think we mean that the person is capable of experiencing large and sonorous emotions… People who are deep are spiritual. They’ve come to some stable philosophical convictions about fundamental things; they’ve made firmly-rooted moral commitments.

To put it in another way: they have a built a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect they have a permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action they have a commitment to important projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality they have a certain consistency and rigor; they’re not always perfect but there’s a sort of moral demand that pervades everything they do.

The next question is, how long does it take to get depth? When we look at people who we think have depth, we notice that it doesn’t happen all at once. The desires that lead you astray, those things are fast — lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things that we admire most — honesty, humility, self-control, courage — those things take some time and accumulate slowly.

It’s an ensemble of settled feelings. It’s not something that happens to people when they’re fifteen.

And these individuals often possess a certain virtue.

And the word ‘virtue’, again, it has pompous connotations. It seems stuffed-up, self-righteous. But all virtue means is that you have your loves in the right order. We all love and desire a multitude of things: love, friendship, family, popularity. We all desire money, to be good shape. And we understand whether we’ve thought about it or not that some loves are higher than other loves — that the love of family is higher than the love of money. If you’ve sold out your family to make an extra buck, you’ve done something wrong.

If the love of truth or friendship is higher than the love of popularity. If somebody tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party, you’ve become popular for a few minutes in that conversation, but you’ve inverted your love. And so being virtuous is not some pompous thing, it’s not some puritanical thing. It’s just having your loves in the right order.”

__________

Pulled from David Brooks’s speech at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival “The Road to Depth: Thinking about What Character Is”. Find these ideas elaborated in Brooks’s new book The Road to Character.

There’s more:

Why Radicals Always Target the Family

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Political Philosophy, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Why Radicals Always Target the Family

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

“As our families fragment, so do the deepest structures of our consciousness. When a certain kind of family breaks down, so do the values which once linked parents and children, and gave continuity and character to our inherited world.

Which is precisely why ideological radicals have focused on the family. Change it, and you change humanity. But let’s turn the argument around: if changing the family would change the world, protecting the family might be the best way of protecting our world.

Which is, I believe, what our religious tradition has been doing until now — because the Bible is above all a book about the family. It begins with one: Adam and Eve, and the command to bring the next generation into being. And from then on the book of Genesis never relaxed its grip on the subject. It endlessly turns to some new variation in the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children. Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob, Rachel and Leah: these aren’t miracle workers or agents of salvation. The heroes and heroines of Genesis are simply people living out their lives in the presence of God and the context of their families.

And we can perhaps now see that this forms the foundation of the Bible’s larger moral and social themes. The family is the matrix of individuality. It’s that enclosed space in which we work out, in relation to stable sources of affection, a highly differentiated sense of who we are. It’s hard to imagine a culture which didn’t possess a close family structure arriving at the breathtaking idea that the human individual is cast in the image of God.

De Tocqueville once wrote that ‘as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.’ By which he meant that the family is the great protection of the individual against the state. It’s no coincidence that totalitarian regimes have often attacked the family. Against this, it was the Bible that gave rise to the great prophets who dared to criticize kings. The family is the birthplace of liberty.

Not only that, it’s where we care for dependents — the very young and the very old, those to whom we gave birth and who gave birth to us. And it’s a short step from this to the biblical vision of society as an extended family, in which the poor and powerless make a claim on us, by virtue not of abstract principle but of feelings of kinship. It’s this that lies behind the prophetic identification with the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. They’re not merely people with theoretical rights. They’re part of the family.”

__________

Pulled from part three of Jonathan Sacks’s 1990 Reith Lecture for the BBC.

You can find this and the rest of Sack’s excellent, six-part lecture in his book The Persistence of Faith: Morality and Society in a Secular Age. As with anything from Sacks, however, try to enjoy it in audio form. His voice makes Morgan Freeman sound like Gilbert Gottfriend.

More:

Jonathan Sacks

What Liberals Still Have to Conserve

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in History, Political Philosophy, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on What Liberals Still Have to Conserve

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Tony Judt

“The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve… The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand. In Orwell’s words, reflecting in Homage to Catalonia upon his recent experiences in revolutionary Barcelona:

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

__________

Pulled from Tony Judt’s speech “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?”, given at New York University in October 2009, the same month he became paralyzed from the neck down due to ALS.

You’ll find a modified version in his excellent collection of conversations with Timothy Snyder Thinking the Twentieth Century.

Listen to it:

Read on:

“By God, Believe in Something”: Michael Sheen’s Rant against Cynical Politicians

30 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by in Speeches

≈ Comments Off on “By God, Believe in Something”: Michael Sheen’s Rant against Cynical Politicians

Tags

, , , , ,

Michael Sheen

“So when people are too scared to say what they really mean, when they’re too careful to speak from their hearts, when integrity is too much of a risk, it’s no surprise that people feel disengaged with politics.

There is never an excuse to not speak up for what you think is right. You must stand up for what you believe. But first of all, by God, believe in something. Because there are plenty out there who believe in grabbing as much as they can for themselves. Constantly sniffing around for markets to exploit, for weakness to expose. They won’t say it, of course – they’re too smart for that. […]

This is about who we want to be as a nation, and what we believe is worth fighting for. Too many people have given too much, and fought too hard, for us to give away what they achieved and to be left with so very little. To those across the whole party political spectrum, and to anyone in any position of power or authority, I ask you to search your heart, and look at who and what you serve…

I say to you, as Aneurin Bevan said in Trafalgar Square in 1956: you have besmirched the name of Britain; you have made us ashamed of the things of which formerly we were proud; you have offended against every principle of decency. And there is only way in which you can even begin to restore your tarnished reputation: get out! Get out! Get… out!”

__________

Michael Sheen’s impassioned speech in defense of the NHS, given at the People’s March in South Wales earlier this month.

This is one of those you need to watch and hear, not just read. For a lighter take, you can see Sheen in a more relaxed role in the most charming movie of the last decade.

More for your rhetoric class:

Douglas Murray: “I Don’t Have an Israel”

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Douglas Murray: “I Don’t Have an Israel”

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Douglas Murray - writer

“There’s a book that came out at exactly the same time as the Charlie Hebdo atrocities. It’s by Michel Hollelbeq, and it’s called Submission — some of you have read about it.

There’s a point in this book which I think is extremely important for what we must think of, which is how to impart an urgent concern for free speech beyond the people in this room and to wider society.

The most critical point in this novel… not to give away the whole plot, but there’s a French professor. It’s 2024 and France is becoming a Muslim country. The Jews are all leaving, and this professor who’s not Jewish — he’s an atheist Frenchman, likes his pleasures, you know — and he’s speaking to a Jewish friend who says she’s off to Israel.

And there’s a very, very important point in the novel where this man realizes he doesn’t have an Israel.

Now, this is a very, very important thing to tell people in this country, and it goes far beyond the Jews.

I don’t have an Israel. This is it. If you care about a decent, democratic, broadly pluralistic society in which you can live the life you want to live, this is the best deal and I don’t have a get out option. Now other people need to know that.”

__________

(Slightly modified) remarks from Douglas Murray during last month’s panel on free speech and the future of Europe at London’s Central Synagogue.

There’s more on the topic:

Gore Vidal: I Always Thought Lincoln Was Wrong

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in History, Interview

≈ Comments Off on Gore Vidal: I Always Thought Lincoln Was Wrong

Tags

, , , , , ,

Abraham Lincoln color

“I always thought Lincoln was wrong. I always thought the South had every right to go. If Lincoln had a high moral purpose — which has now been invented for him, posthumously, the abolition of slavery — I’d say, well it’s illegal but it’s morally worthy.

He was not interested in freeing the slaves. He was interested in the preservation of the union and power and centralization. He turned to the Constitution and said I have no right to free the slaves, no constitutional right.

When he finally did get around to a degree of emancipation, he did it entirely under military necessity. I think he made a great mistake.

If I had been around at the time, I think I would have been for [Secretary of State William H.] Seward, who said let the South go. He called them the ‘Mosquito Republics,’ and asked ‘What are they going to do?’. They have two crops: cotton and tobacco. They’ve got no place to go. We’re getting all this immigration. We’re going to seize Canada one day. Let’s take over Mexico and Central America — he was extremely ambitious — and the South will come back. They’ll be knocking on the door. Why kill 600,000 young men for a notion of the union, which nobody had thought much of before then?”

__________

Gore Vidal, responding to a question about whether his favorite theory of government — that of devolution, where power is drawn outward to states and localities — contradicted the principles fought for by our 16th president.

Unsurprisingly, one of Vidal’s most acclaimed books, Lincoln: A Novel, shatters the saintly Lincoln death mask to reveal a man unrelentingly political, beset by personal and marital hang ups, and often unsure of even minor decisions in office. It’s a compelling portraiture, one you won’t find in the National Gallery.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in History, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Abraham Lincoln 342

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Abraham Lincoln second inauguration

__________

387 of the 700 total words in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered 150 years ago today. Above is the only known photograph of the event.

Months of sleet had made Pennsylvania Avenue look like a muddy riverbed by the first week of March in 1865. On the 4th, thousands of spectators stood in the inch-thick runoff at the Capitol grounds to hear what was one of the shortest, and undoubtedly one of the finest, inaugural speeches by an American president. Standing under a recently finished East Portico, Lincoln was sworn in by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox 33 days later. Lincoln was assassinated 6 days after that.

Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for George H. W. Bush, calls the Second Inaugural the greatest speech in American history, surpassing Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg as well as the thunderclap from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Entering that monument, Buckley reflects,

Inside the memorial, graven on the walls, are the two speeches in American history that surpass Dr. King’s: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. I read the latter aloud to myself, quietly, so as not to alarm anyone. It clocks in at under five minutes, bringing the total of those two orations to about seven minutes. Edward Everett, who also spoke at Gettysburg, wrote Lincoln afterward to say, “I should flatter myself if I could come to the heart of the occasion in two hours in what you did in two minutes.”

Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the statue of Lincoln that stares out on the Reflecting Pool, studied a cast of Lincoln’s life mask. You can see a cast in the basement of the memorial, and it is hard to look upon the noble serenity of that plaster without being moved. Embarking from Springfield, Illinois, in 1861 to begin his first term as president, Lincoln said, “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” When I first read that speech as a schoolboy, I thought the line sounded immodest. Harder than what Washington faced? Come on! Only years later when I saw again the look on Lincoln’s face that French had captured did I understand.

More from the man: