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

"It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government, "he observed, "that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment... That men are capable of self-government."

The vice presidency “ought to be abolished,” he told his friend Leonard Wood. “The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.

Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could “not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment.