Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party — including the impracticable, th… - Doris Kearns Goodwin

I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.

To find the best authors,” he boasted, “is like being able to tell good wine without the labels.