H. W. Brands Quotes
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Clemens’s loss was literature’s gain. Forced to earn his daily bread once more, he turned to mining in the Mother Lode country. He found little gold, but gathered impressions and experiences. He met Bret Harte, and guessed that if Harte could make money from stories about the gold country, so could he. He proved himself right with a tale about a jumping-frog contest in Calaveras County, which won him a wide and enthusiastic national readership.
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Reporter Jacob Riis made it his mission to expose the horrors of poverty in New York. New to working with a camera, his flash actually set the walls of One apartment inhabited by five blind people on fire.
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Liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop. You do not do that. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them
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Andrew Carnegie was an inventor only in the sense that he adopted and adapted the discoveries of others.
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The politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.
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Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.
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Both sides had more confidence in their opponents weaknesses than their own strength.
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The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.
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It was a typical point, made in typical style, mixing pride and humility.
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I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she'd get one-syllable answers.
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In imperial relationships, getting out proves much more complicated than getting in.
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Such was the code: Strive for victory, but never seem to be self-involved.