Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are, for it shows me what your ideal of manhood is and what kind of man you long to be.

—Thomas Carlyle, from Latter-day Pamphlets, no. 07, Hudson’s Statue, July 1850

If you know history, you know that there is no such thing as a self-made man or self-made woman. We are shaped by people we have never met.

—David McCullough, from “The Course of Human Events,” Jefferson Lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2003

If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful.

—Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to his son Kermit on January 27, 1915, as published in Theodore Roosevelt and his time: Shown in his own letters, vol. 1, by Joseph B. Bishop (1920)