Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life Of Abraham Lincoln Quotes
Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.
Dominance can be a tempration to division. "There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.
Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.
Lincoln loved other people's jokes as much as his own.
Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.
The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.
She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.
Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.
Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.
Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.
Most principles are limp until they are tested.
It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.
Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.
As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.
A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.
Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.
One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.
Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.
She became at once more intimate and more exalted.
God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.
Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.
Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.
To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.
Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.
He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.
Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.