Quotes from Harold Holzer

Looking to advance in journalism, one future editor displayed skilled as varied as economic analysis and humorous commentary.

His targets had little in common, other than that they had somehow aroused his enmity.

One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

James Gordon Bennett said he aimed to be, "serious in my aims but full of frolic in my means.

General literature without the humbug," was the New Yorker's original mission.

The firmament breaks up. In black eclipse Light after light goes out. One evil star, Luridly glaring through the smoke of war, As in the dream of the Apocalypse, Drags others down.

Lincoln on a desire to hear Horace Greeley speak: "In print, every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton.

Lincoln said his spiky hair had "a way of getting up in the world".

One editor during the Civil War got a grievous message to meet his brothers corpse, only to find out that the telegraph operator had garbled the message to meet his living brother's CORPS.

A female war correspondent so popular that she had some credibility in saying she controlled half of her newspaper's circulation approached General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War with information that could help him. He was unwilling to get help from someone in petticoats.

The author observers that better technology actually increased division because rival outlets funded by rival parties could get their slant to the partisans

The press-savy Lincoln looked not to the future, but to the past.

Lincoln jibed that a general INVADED Canada without resistance and out-vaded it without pursuit.

Stephen Douglas's oratory was designed for the galleries, Lincoln's for his peers

The author said Frederick Douglass described himself as a "graduate" of slavery with the marks of his diploma on his back.

The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.

Horace Greeley pursues temperance to extravagance." Lord Acton

At times, said the founder of the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln seemed to reach into the clouds and take out the thunderbolts.

One of the cost of holding a Federal office was geographic isolation in the nation's capital.

I have read, upon my knees, the story of Gethsemane, where the Son of God prayed in vain that the cup of bitterness might pass from him. I am in the Garden of Gethsemane now, and my cup of bitterness is full and overflowing.