He had an extraordinary physical beauty and hardihood and an exceedingly shrewd and courageous spirit; he was unsurpassed in his love of...

no mortal existed now, nor would ever exist, who did not have a mixture of adversity in his life from the moment of his birth; indeed the...

That summer, working mostly at Chartwell, Churchill completed the third volume of his Marlborough biography. A young Oxford don, Bill Deakin, agreed to help him organize the enormous amount of historical material. It was a time of formidable concentration. ‘I never saw him tired,’ Deakin later recalled. ‘He was absolutely totally organized, almost like a clock. He knew how to husband his energy, he knew how to expend it. His routine was absolutely dictatorial. He set himself

Hitler was not a great man in the good sense, but he did share characteristics in his youth which are consistent with other great men:

Our Fabius, who was fourth in descent from that Fabius Rullus who first brought the honourable surname of Maximus into his family, was also, by way of personal nickname, called Verrucosus, from a wart on his upper lip; and in his childhood they in like manner named him Ovicula, or The Lamb, on account of his extreme mildness of temper. His slowness in speaking, his long labour and pains in learning, his deliberation in entering into the sports of other children, his easy subm

Themistocles:

There is no Frigate like a Book," wrote Emily Dickinson, "to take us Lands away." Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave America, he traveled with Byron's Childe Harold to Spain and Portugal, the Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the English kings into battle with Shakespeare. As he explored the wonders of literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own power, dev

During the winter encampments, Hamilton constantly educated himself, as if equipping his mind for the larger tasks ahead. "Force of intellect and force of will were the sources of his success." Henry Cabot Lodge later wrote. From his days as an artillery captain, Hamilton had kept a pay book with blank pages in the back; while on Washington's staff, he filled up 112 pages with notes from his extracurricular reading. Hamilton fit the type of the self-improving autodidact, empl

Alexander Hamilton and his brother:

During the war the media was brutal on Lincoln, after his death, these same papers praised him as the savior of America:

“We want great men who, when fortune frowns, will not be discouraged.” - Col. Henry Knox

Ordinary men, Clausewitz wrote, become depressed by a sense of danger and responsibility; if these conditions are to “lend wings to strengthen the judgment, there must be present unusual greatness of soul.”