It seemed as though Theodore's passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her. - Doris Kearns Goodwin

The experience of this campaign vindicated his belief that politics was essentially personal relations. In a twenty-minute appearance, he limited his speeches to five minutes so that he could spend the remaining fifteen minutes “touching” his audience. “A five-minute speech,” he later said, “with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen-minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.

We do not have to become heroes overnight,” Eleanor once wrote. “Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

Lincoln's ability to retain his emotional balance in such difficult situations was rooted in actute self-awareness and an enormous capacity to dispel anxiety in constructive ways.