Sublime

And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages.

‘What is there against Bulstrode?’ said Lydgate, emphatically. ‘I did not say there was anything against him except that. If you vote against him you will make him your enemy.’ ‘I don’t know that I need mind about that,’ said Lydgate, rather proudly; ‘but he seems to have good ideas about hospitals, and he spends large sums on useful public

for to attempt to render the representative of the State a powerful sovereign, and at the same time elective, is, in my opinion, to entertain two incompatible designs.

John Gunther was to write about Roosevelt’s “worst quality,” a “deviousness,” a “lack of candor” that “verged on deceit.” Men who had known Roosevelt longer—when he had been Governor of New York—used stronger words; in Albany it had been whispered that a commitment from the Governor could not be trusted; New York City’s ordinarily mild-mannered

An aspect of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and power that had been evident through his life was that the more of it he got, the more intoxicated he became with it. Now he had had a lot of it (“My God—running the world!”), and had had it for a long time: the eight years he had been the Democratic Leader of the Senate, minority and

His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbours’ hope and fear as well as gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external means.

Rather, he disappeared into his study to read political philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Pascal, Hegel, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. He read Toynbee, Gibbon, and the memoirs of statesmen (all of Churchill’s), biography, and some fiction, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (but not, unfortunately, the tragedies of Sophocles,

Many of the state’s conservative business leaders had, once the excitement of the campaign had faded, reached the same conclusion as Busby, and realized they had been unjust to Stevenson, and they asked him to run—ample financing assured—for Tom Connally’s Senate seat in 1952; he would, after all, be only sixty-four years old, they pointed out. He