Quotes from Stephen B. Oates

The legitimate object of government," he later asserted, "is 'to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.

Once when they went horseback riding with other young couples, they came to a stream and all the other men helped their women across. But not Lincoln: he rode on alone and left Mary to fend for herself. She was miffed. Frankly, she thought he had terrible manners. And he was moody, too, and seemed never to have anything to say that was light and fun and tender. He never said much at all.

When it seemed that Lincoln might throw the champion, the entire Clary Grove clan jumped him and drove the tall clerk back against the bluff. But Lincoln, blazing with defiance, offered to take them all on—one at a time. Impressed with his pluck, Armstrong shook Lincoln's hand, turned to the spectators, and pronounced the fight a draw.

He avoided eligible young women, too, because he was insecure in their presence and was afraid of failure and rejection in love.

As Lincoln had predicted would happen under popular sovereignty, civil war now raged on the Kansas prairie—proof indeed that slavery was too volatile ever to be solved as a purely local matter.

If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively…. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

In time Logan considered Lincoln "a pretty good lawyer" and taught him a great deal about the importance of painstaking preparation, of compiling an exact and thorough brief before defending a client in court.

In truth, Lincoln tried not to carry personal resentments. "A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels," he said.

But Lincoln was as immovable as stone. "I am a slow walker," he said, "but I never walk back." He conceded that the final proclamation "has done about as much harm as good.

Southerners could not throw off the Constitution and at the same time invoke it to protect slavery.

He never published any more cruel and anonymous satire either, for he'd finally learned that it could hurt people and lead to embarrassing and potentially dangerous repercussions. Moreover, he avoided even the threat of fighting to uphold his honor. He deplored violence anyway. When someone insulted him or tried to pick a fight, Lincoln just laughed at the man and walked off.

But when Herndon took off on some "deep volume," like the writings of Immanuel Kant, Lincoln would wave it away as indigestible.

You know, Lincoln told Hay, that any other general but Grant would have fallen back across the Rapidan by now. "It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins," Lincoln said.

Lincoln had good reason to speak of slavery strictly in terms of preserving the Union: they were the only terms the white public was likely to accept.

The lesson was clear: they should have voted for Clay even if he was a slave owner. That would not have been evil, because a tree was known by the fruit it bore. "If the fruit of electing Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery, could the act of electing have been evil?

he looked forward to the day when all men could free themselves from the "tyrant of spirits," when all appetites would be controlled, all passions subdued, and "mind, all conquering mind," would rule the world.

Though most students in those days read with an accomplished attorney in his office, Lincoln taught himself entirely on his own.

tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.