A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree ther… - Doris Kearns Goodwin

The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.

The surest way to be happy,” Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, “is to seek happiness for others.

And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.