Quotes About Lincoln

Yet to imagine this outcome [slavery being impermissible everywhere] as somehow preordained is to be misguided by hindsight...Lincoln got it right when, shortly before his death, he called the result of the war 'astounding.

That was in the days when everyone rode a bicycle, and the journal had a circulation of over one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly, so my verses and illustrations became known to a fairly large public.

Lincoln was the spokesman of the rising capitalist class of the North, who viewed the emancipation of Negro slaves as indispensable to the development and triumph of the manufacturers and bankers of the industrial North, East and West over the slave-holder of the South.

I had not got over the prejudice against Lincoln with which my personal contact with him in 1858 imbued me.

Out of the west came Lincoln, and all that he had he gave to the preservation of the Union that had been bought so dearly and was falling to pieces.

I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today.

I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him.

In March the Lincoln County Weekly Tribune, revising its earlier bullish report,

It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.

With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap

If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.

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

I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. --February 22, 1861

October 19th. (To Miss Grace Bedell) Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received. I regret the necessity to of saying I have no daughter. I have three sons--one seventeen, one nine, and one seven. They with their mother constitute my whole family. As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin now?

Lincoln called laughter "the joyous, beautiful, universal evergreen of life."

Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all.

It was difficult to find my way into 'I Am Abraham,' to feel confident enough to inhabit Lincoln's persona. I began with a prologue in a neutral voice, wrote of Lincoln at the White House with a sly young reporter quizzing him about his humble origins.

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

I'm not a Lincoln expert, rather a biographer who has had the pleasure of reading much of what has been written about him from his lifetime to this year of his bicentennial. Some advice: Don't try that unless you have at least five years available.

Obviously, 'Lincoln' is not about the telegraph operator. There's a whole other movie before and after the two isolated scenes that I'm in.

And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

He raised his hands, not to strike, but in benediction. Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil war. He is the gentlest memory of our world.

in the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier generals of volunteers, and the Illinois caucus enjoyed such sway that six Illinois brigadiers were selected, two more than any other state.

Grant's fortuitous move to Illinois on the eve of the election had monumental consequences, conveniently situating him in the president's home state and overtly pro-Union northern Illinois. It also placed him in the district of Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, an emphatic Lincoln supporter. Had Grant remained in Missouri, riven by internal strife, he would never have enjoyed the same chance for rapid advancement in the coming war.