Quotes About Lincoln

In this partisan diatribe, Lincoln spent most of his time attacking Stephen Douglas's arguments on behalf of the Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce while offering little positive support of Winfield Scott or the Whigs. He decimated many Democratic arguments but replaced them with virtually nothing. To expose Franklin Pierce's "ludicrous and laughable" record as a brigadier general in the Mexican War

In Lincoln's day, Riley's account also spoke to a burning issue: the troubling institution of slavery. Inverting the American paradigm, it provided a useful perspective and helped expose the brutality of that abysmal practice. In our time, when one of the great challenges we face is to find common ground for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the plight of the crew of the Commerce achieves a new relevance. It

Lincoln dumped his bland second-in-command, Hannibal Hamlin, for Johnson

At Lincoln's second inaugural, a drunken Johnson, who had had one too many whiskeys that morning, plunged into a long, rambling, incoherent discourse, shouting about his humble origins and lecturing the assembled dignitaries from the Supreme Court and the diplomatic corps ("With all your fine feathers and gew-gaws") that they were merely "creatures of the people." Then, as he took his oath, Johnson visibly and audibly slobbered upon the Bible.

Republicans controlled the federal government for decades after the Civil War, and their policies funneled wealth upward -- with dire consequences. In 1893, the economy crashed, and too few Americans had enough purchasing power to revive it. Lincoln had been right: Government that served the wealthy would ruin the country.

There is, of course, only one chosen nation. But Abraham Lincoln would call America 'an almost chosen nation' because he believed that America had a providential role to play in history, inspired by the example of God's ancient covenant people.

Hate cultures are not a thing of the past. They're a continuing problem and one cannot blame presidencies for this. Racism in the U.S. began way back, before the time of Abraham Lincoln.

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.'

No president in history has been more vilified or was more vilivied during the time he was President than Lincoln. Those who knew him, his secretaries, have written that he was deeply hurt by what was said about him and drawn about him, but on the other hand, Lincoln had the great strength of character never to display it, always able to stand tall and strong and firm no matter how harsh or unfair the criticism might be. These elements of greatness, of course, inspire us all today.

Mr. Dallstrom is a bald, scarecrow of a man with a poochy stomache. Think of a pregnant Abraham Lincoln.

And Norma Jeane, the neurotic woman who created and became Marilyn Monroe? She grew up with a typically American adoration of Abraham Lincoln, a perfect father-symbol for orphans everywhere; I suspect that when she climbed into bed with Jack Kennedy she really thought she was climbing into bed with Lincoln and history. Nobody had warned her that History is a blood sport, and the only one in which innocent bystanders are the principal victims.

But Lincoln says something about the future that's pretty amazing. He says that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. And it does. The Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—give us a new set of founding principles.

The government, Lincoln suggests, should intervene to protect individuals from other individuals—to redress the natural consequences of inequalities of power.

Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all." "Abraham Lincoln was no Republican." "Hello?" "The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.

Abraham Lincoln said you cannot deceive everybody all the time. Well, that's wishful thinking. In practice, the power of human cooperation networks depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.

So I'd be quite happy to have a three-hour Lincoln/Douglas style debate with Barack Obama. I'd let him use a teleprompter. I'll just rely on knowledge. We'll do fine.

On the 15th day of the same month, President Lincoln, introducing his farce "of combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings," called forth the military of the several States to the number of seventy-five thousand, and commanded "the persons composing the combinations" to disperse, etc.

Mr Lincoln suggested that the Lord sent us this terrible war as punishment for the offense of slavery and that the war may be a mighty scourge to rid US of it

Lincoln's height, saying she'll need to "take a ladder to get to Abraham's bosom." (In later years, Lincoln would turn their fourteen-inch height difference into a joke; they were, he'd say, "the long and the short

As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats.

Early in life, Lincoln decided that he did not want to live like his father, who in his son's eyes exemplified the values of the pre-market world where people remained content with a subsistence lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs—storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor—essential to the market economy.

even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic. Condemnations

The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion. The Proclamation also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 in bondage.

Lincoln had no fears of a powerful central government, for he believed, along with other Whigs, that the purpose of government was "to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all or can not, so well do, for themselves.