Quotes About Lincoln

Well, usually when you talk about a mandate, you're talking about an overwhelming win. I don't think by any measurement the 2004 election was an overwhelming win.

Let us always remember Abraham Lincoln's undeservedly neglected riddle: How many legs has a dog got if you call a tail a leg? The answer, said Lincoln, and he was right, is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt's time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it's different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

I'm not running for the U.S. Senate because I think Lincoln Chafee is a bad man.

In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the "American Idea," which was a "composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….The idea demands…a democracy—a government of all, for all, and by all.

To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love.

Lincoln agreed: "By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.

To blindly and repeatedly assert one's own position, one's own righteousness, and one's own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to "rule or ruin in all events.

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as "the capability of a people to govern themselves.

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as "the capability of a people to govern themselves." He worried about trouble coming from the many as well as the few—or even the one, in the form of a demagogue who might try to profit from lawlessness and distrust.

The saga of race in America is a tragic one—and it unfolds still. In Lincoln's hour upon the stage, many hoped he would go farther along the road toward equality than he did; many feared any step at all. But on he walked.

As Lincoln remarked, "It is my private opinion that, if the Lord has been in Springfield once, he will never come the second time.

Mr. Lincoln had no faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words," Mary Lincoln recalled. "He never joined a Church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature.

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. "Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing," Clay recalled. "I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.

To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love. Lincoln believed in a transcendent moral order that summoned sinful creatures, in the words of Micah, to do justice, to love mercy

Lincoln died as he brought about a nation that would ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to abolish slavery and make citizenship for Black Americans a federal constitutional right. In his lifetime, however, he would never fully put into practice the principles summed up in the motto of a newspaper founded in Rochester, New York, in 1847: Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.

in the battle between the impulses of good and of evil in the American soul, what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" have prevailed just often enough to keep the national enterprise alive.

Driven by the convictions that the Union was sacred and that slavery was wrong, Lincoln was instrumental in saving one and in destroying the other, expanding freedom and preserving an experiment in popular government that nearly came to an end on his watch.

Lincoln offered a case study in the leadership of hope and progress; Andrew Johnson's is an unhappier story of willfulness and single-minded service to a favored constituency—in this case, to white Southerners.

First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.

Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice

Can you inform me, gentlemen, where General Grant procures his whisky? . . . Because if I can find out, I'll send a barrel of it to every General in the field!

So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

Following the footnotes of a Lincoln book can drive you towards madness. But it also gives you the chance to spend days trying to determine whether Lincoln might have actually taken a ride on a flying piano, and that's a damned interesting way to spend one's working life.