Abe Lincoln Quotes

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can excersize their Constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Good things come to those who wait, but only whats left from those who hustle!

Abe Lincoln once remarked that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” He was right.

Contrary to his infallibly "honest" image, Abe wasn't above lying so long as it served a noble purpose.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth


…Abe didn’t say a word. He made straight for his journal and wrote down a single sentence. One that would radically alter the course of his life, and bring a fledgeling nation to the brink of collapse.
I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America.

I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night. Like Abe Lincoln. - Saul Bellow

The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I'd like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we're missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they'd look gawky and gangly on TV.

You'll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted into Miss Columbias, eagles plucked raw on the backs of quarters, all run to quicksilver in your jeans. More! Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord's Prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! A box-Brownie photo, by God, of that fire climbing down the sky to blow you like a penny whistle, suck your soul back up along the bright stair!

You speak of eternal life. You speak of indulging the mind and body,” said Abe. “But what of the soul?” “And what use is a soul to a creature that shall never die?” Abe couldn’t help but smile. Here was a strange little man with a strange way of seeing things. Only the second living man he’d ever met who knew the truth of vampires. He drank to excess and spoke in an irritating, high-​pitched voice. It was hard not to like him. “I begin to suspect,” said Abe, “that you would like to be one of them.” Poe laughed at the suggestion. “Is not our existence long and miserable enough?” he asked, laughing. “Who in God’s name would seek to prolong it?

It is better to give your path to a dog than to be bitten by him, contesting for the right.

I’m growing an Abe Lincoln beard. On my ball sack.

numb" described his effect on her like "handsome" described Abe Lincoln. A woman would have to be dead not to feel a vigorous stirring for a man so incredibly handsome as her wandering polecat.

How blind to believe the civil rights movement ever ended. The civil rights movement never ends, and it never will. It has been marching since the beginning of time. Where Martin Luther King started is where Gandhi left off, and where he started, Abe Lincoln left off, and before that Whitfield all the way back to Moses. God has not moved. We have. But it is never too late. We are not at the mercy of these events. We can alter the course of history. We can stand against the dangerous arc of this story. But we need people who are willing to speak truth.

I’ve never understood why when women marry, they’re expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first—Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln!—as if their previous identities had just been twenty-odd-year placeholders before they became actual people. Mrs. Peter Dickman. It’s a life sentence.

Well, it sure as hell weren't no tree-climbin' horse. (Jack to Abe)

To sin by silnce when they should protest makes cowards of men (and women)...

Now is the time that we walk as humans and not as labels. Rise and walk, like did Rosa Parks, MLK, Madiba (Mandela), Honest Abe (Lincoln), Mevlana (Rumi) and many more.

History remembers Abe's towering intellect but forgets that, in those days, he was more towering than intellectual.

...as Abe Lincoln said, I was sick from my stovepipe hat to the worn out soles of my shoes.

when women marry, they’re expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first—Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln!

I felt bad for lying to John, who was about as honest as Abe Lincoln on sodium Pentothal.

One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with.

I thought orange was a more electable color, so I dyed my whole cat orange, and renamed him Abe Lincoln. I licked his fur clean in celebration of his victory.

I went to a theater two nights ago. I know, you’re probably wondering if Abe Lincoln got shot. But no, I visited 1865 last week, and I stayed for a few years while perfecting my harmonica ears.

I have seen just as many happy faces among the poor peasants toiling with their primitive tools in the devastating heat of the tropics as I have seen in air-conditioned offices in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. Most Folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

All right,” I said, and wrote in my notebook, Abe Lincoln type. I didn’t have to remind myself about that. I just wrote because I had got in the habit. You can build up an awful lot of habits in six years, and you can fill an awful lot of little black books in that time and put them in a safety-deposit box when they get full because they aren’t something to leave around and because they would be worth their weight in gold to some parties to get their hands on. Not that they ever got their hands on them. A man’s got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backward and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books. The little black books lie up there in the safety-deposit box, and there are your works of days and hands all cozy in the dark in the little box and the world’s great axis grinds.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I’ve never understood why when women marry, they’re expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first—Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln!—as if their previous identities had just been twenty-odd-year placeholders before they became actual people.

The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body. Embalming received another boost four years later, when Abe Lincoln’s embalmed body traveled from Washington to his hometown in Illinois. The train ride amounted to a promotional tour for funerary embalming, for wherever the train stopped, people came to view him, and more than a few must have noted that he looked a whole lot better in his casket than Grandmama had looked in hers. Word spread and the practice grew, like a chicken heart, and soon the whole nation was sending their decedents in to be posed and preserved.

Lincoln found that Shakespeare’s universal appeal lay in his depiction of shared human qualities. Disloyalty, jealousy, revenge, hatred, madness, self-destructiveness, tomfoolery, devotion, faith, depression—they were all there in Shakespeare’s plays, delivered in language so carefully calibrated that they remained under artistic control.

In one of the rare moments that he discussed his private beliefs, Lincoln declared he would join a church if he found one whose only requirement was to follow the Golden Rule.

with malice toward none and charity for all.

Then how about this: Remember Austin Gollaher, because what we do matters, even if we don't end up in history books.

When he was a kid, Gibson had mispronounced George Abe’s name until his father corrected him: “Ah-bay. More Japanese, less Lincoln.” As

Exactly,” she said. “I’ve never understood why when women marry, they’re expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first—Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln!—as if their previous identities had just been twenty-odd-year placeholders before they became actual people. Mrs. Peter Dickman. It’s a life sentence.

When I have a particular case in hand,” he explained, “I . . . love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind.

he allegedly told his host, “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea, but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

We'll not let our passions break our bonds of affection" - A. Lincoln

Whatever you are be a good one

Look at what you've done" he said after a sickened silence. "You've killed us" "On the contrary... I've killed him." "More will come." Abe had already begun to walk away. "Then I shall need more stakes.

Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

So you don’t believe in heaven.” “I didn’t say that. I mean, sure, it sounds cozy, but who knows? Most people don’t really care about heaven. I think they worry about being relevant to other living people, even after they’re dead. But one day there won’t be anyone left who fits that bill. One day this planet will combust, and we’ll all turn into star stuff. Cleopatra? Abe Lincoln? Adam and Eve? Relevant to no one.” “Well, that’s optimistic.

Henry Villard took sarcastic note of the sudden “adornment of whiskers” on November 19. “His old friends, who have been used to a great indifference as to the ‘outer man,’ on his part,” the journalist punned, “say that ‘Abe is putting on airs.

Most moving of all was Raymond Massey’s voice, the voice that portrayed Lincoln in Bob Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, reading Stephen Vincent Benét’s Prayer for United Nations,2 which the President himself had once recited on Flag Day: “God of the Free, we pledge our lives and hearts today to the cause of all free mankind…. Grant us brotherhood in hope and union, not only for the space of this bitter war, but for the days to come which shall and must unite all the children of earth.

By mid-November, his protests notwithstanding, whiskers began sprouting from his face. A few weeks later, his assistant private secretary, John Hay, approvingly punned: Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant— Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.44

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The perpetual demonization of the South and Southerners is part and parcel of the Lincoln myth. The continued demonization of everything Southern is part of the gatekeepers’ strategy to keep the public from ever becoming curious about alternative interpretations of nineteenth-century history.

Were an election for President to be held tomorrow, Old Abe would, without the special aid of any of his friends, walk over the course, without a competitor to dispute with him the great prize which his masterly ability, no less than his undoubted patriotism and unimpeachable honesty, have won.

He was going for those Reagan Democrats,” Joe continues explaining. “Except there aren’t any Reagan Democrats, there’re just cut-and-dried rednecks. Now that I’m down south here, I understand better what it’s all about. It’s all about blacks. One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, the Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it’s bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with, barring a massive depression or a boo-boo the size of Watergate. Ollie North doesn’t do it. Reagan being an airhead didn’t do it. Face it: the bulk of this country is scared to death of the blacks. That’s the one gut issue we’ve got.

Julian said he had read about a march to Washington, D.C., to be led by Martin Luther King, Jr.... "King leading a march. Who is he going to pray to this time, the statue of Abe Lincoln?" "Give us our freedom again, please suh." "King has been in jail so much he's got a liking for those iron bars and jailhouse food." The ridicule fitted our consciousness. We were brave revolutionaries, not pussyfooting nonviolent cowards. We scorned the idea of being spat upon, kicked, and then turning our cheeks for more abuse. Of course, none of us, save Julian, had even been close to bloody violence, and not one of us had spent an hour in jail for our political beliefs. My policy was to keep quiet when Reverend King's name was mentioned. I didn't want to remind my radical friends of my association with the peacemaker. It was difficult, but I managed to dispose of the idea that my silence was a betrayal. After all, when I worked for him, I had been deluded into agreeing with Reverend King that love would cure America of its pathological illnesses, that indeed our struggle for equal rights would redeem the country's baleful history. But all the prayers, sit-ins, sacrifices, jail sentences, humiliation, insults and jibes had not borne out Reverend King's vision. When maddened White citizens and elected political leaders vowed to die before they would see segregation come to an end, I became more resolute in rejecting nonviolence and more adamant in denying Martin Luther King.

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. – Ben Franklin Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. – Ben Franklin Malcolm X once said, Time is on the side of the oppressed today. It’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today. It’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else. President Abe Lincoln uttered a profound and prophetic maxim approximately 150 years ago, If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.

Thus, Lincoln “saved” the federal union in the same sense that a man who has been abusing his wife “saves” his marital union by violently forcing his wife back into the home and threatening to shoot her if she leaves again. The union may well be saved, but it is not the same kind of union that existed on their wedding day. That union no longer exists. The American union of the founding fathers ceased to exist in April of 1865.

When a grizzled yeoman worker appeared one morning to complain that as a state legislator many years earlier, in hard times, young Lincoln had inexcusably voted to raise his government salary from two to all of four dollars a day,” Lincoln listened to the reproach calmly. “Now, Abe, I want to know what in the world made you do it?” demanded the old Democrat. With deadpan seriousness, Lincoln explained: “I reckon the only reason was that we wanted the money.

Melancholy Shakespearean passages provided him with relief. They offered structured, resonant versions of gloom. They organized sad topics and made them meaningful. Reciting dark writings aloud let him project his depression outward so that it was filtered through the improving lens of poetry. The rhythms and images of verse crystallized his private experience in a manner similar to the way his finest speeches crystallized and uplifted the national experience.

I wanted to be accepted. It must have been in sixth grade. It was just before the Fourth of July. They were trying out students for this patriotic play. I wanted to do Abe Lincoln, so I learned the Gettysburg Address inside and out. I’d be out in the fields pickin’ the crops and I’d be memorizin’. I was the only one who didn’t have to read the part, ’cause I learned it. The part was given to a girl who was a grower’s daughter. She had to read it out of a book, but they said she had better diction. I was very disappointed. I quit about eighth grade. “Any time anybody’d talk to me about politics, about civil rights, I would ignore it. It’s a very degrading thing because you can’t express yourself. They wanted us to speak English in the school classes. We’d put out a real effort. I would get into a lot of fights because I spoke Spanish and they couldn’t understand it. I was punished. I was kept after school for not speaking English.

Reflecting this view—and worse—a small-town Georgia newspaper warned: “Can we suppose, for a moment, that the South will submit to a Black Ruler of our Government?” Vowing never to recognize a so-called “negro President,” the journal labeled Lincoln “a notorious nigger thief” and posted a $10,000 reward for “Hannibal’s and ABE’S heads without their bodies,” hinting that Vice President–elect Hannibal Hamlin was himself of African descent. Lincoln kept the vile clipping in his files.

In fact, every American that Dickens shows in the book is a homicidal idiot, except one--and he wanted to live abroad! Well! You can't tell me that a degenerate bunch like that could have taken the very river- bottom swamps that Dickens describes, and in three generations have turned 'em into the prosperous cement-paved powerful country that they are today! Yet Europe goes on reading hack authors who still steal their ideas from 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and saying, 'There, I told you so!' Say, do you realize that at the time Dickens described the Middlewest--my own part of the country--as entirely composed of human wet rags, a fellow named Abe Lincoln and another named Grant were living there; and not more than maybe ten years later, a boy called William Dean Howells (I heard him lecture once at Yale, and I notice that they still read his book about Venice IN Venice) had been born? Dickens couldn't find or see people like that. Perhaps some European observers today are missing a few Lincolns and Howellses!

At Charleston, three days later, he was on more hospitable ground. Many in Coles County had known Thomas Lincoln and his family, and some enthusiasts spread a gigantic painting, eighty feet long, across the main street, showing OLD ABE THIRTY YEARS AGO, on a Kentucky wagon pulled by three yoke of oxen. Democrats countered with a banner, captioned “Negro Equality,” which depicted a white man standing with a Negro woman, and a mulatto boy in the background. Republicans found this so offensive that they tore it down before allowing the debate to begin.

The difference becomes clear if we consider Herman Melville’s distinction between a thoughtful response to Shakespeare and that of the mere thrill seeker. Melville contrasted “those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers,” with the contemplative reader, who was unconcerned with “blood-besmeared tragedy” for its own sake and attended instead to “those deep far-away things” in the Bard of Avon, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality . . . that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.

Suffice it to say that Old Abe was not a Great Emancipator but a Great Manipulator.

I walk slowly . . . but I never walk backwards. ~Abe Lincoln

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.

Young Lincoln disagreed with his father over religion. In 1823, Thomas Lincoln and his wife joined the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, as did his daughter Sarah soon afterward; but Abraham made no move toward membership. Indeed, as his stepmother said, “Abe had no particular religion— didn’t think of these question[ s] at that time, if he ever did.” Though Abraham did not belong to the church, he attended the sermons, and afterward, climbing on a tree stump, he would rally the other children around him and repeat— or sometimes parody— the minister’s words.

An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like John Wesley Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.

It is an empty joy to appear better than you are; but a great blessing to be what you ought to be.

I mean, probably you’re after a blow by blow. Moving the pieces about the war table, telling you who duelled who like King goddamn Arthur against Abe Lincoln. But man, I was hiding. It’s what I do.

Anyone can learn from Lincoln’s enormous largeness of spirit. Those of us who are performers can look at the public utterance for which he is best remembered and take our own cue from Abe Lincoln: Don’t feel that you have to show people everything you can do. Just show them the best you can do.

The Hill Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley, The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter? All, all are sleeping on the hill. One passed in a fever, One was burned in a mine, One was killed in a brawl, One died in a jail, One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife — All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill. Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith, The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one? — All, all are sleeping on the hill. One died in shameful child-birth, One of a thwarted love, One at the hands of a brute in a brothel, One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire, One after life in far-away London and Paris Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag — All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill. Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily, And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton, And Major Walker who had talked With venerable men of the revolution? — All, all are sleeping on the hill. They brought them dead sons from the war, And daughters whom life had crushed, And their children fatherless, crying — All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill. Where is Old Fiddler Jones Who played with life all his ninety years, Braving the sleet with bared breast, Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin, Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven? Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago, Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary's Grove, Of what Abe Lincoln said One time at Springfield.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right.

tried to step around me but I jumped in his way again. “I don’t care what those guys say because you need to listen to me and fast,” I said. “Right now you’re acting like a punk and the real Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a punk. He was the most non punk that ever lived. He was honest, and brave, and a great leader. If you don’t start acting like that soon, then all of history will be broken for good.” Abe gave me a peculiar look, like he was thinking about what I had to say. With my boyish good looks and natural charm, I could be pretty convincing. Then he kicked me so hard that I landed in a tree. I’ll admit, that did not go exactly how I had pictured it. But, with me getting erased from my own life and all, I didn’t have time to whine about it. Once I got myself

I know we’re missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they’d look gawky and gangly on TV.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” This system is no different than Abe’s tree. If you don’t sharpen your axe and put in place the necessary foundational elements first, the rest of it won’t be nearly as effective. What we’re doing here is building a system that you’ll come to rely on

About Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States. Born in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky, in 1809, he grew up smart, even though he rarely attended school. While working as a postmaster and surveyor, he began to study law. He married Mary Todd in 1842. Abe eventually entered politics. Shortly after he was elected president in 1861, the Civil War began. Firm in his belief that a divided nation could not survive, Lincoln mobilized the North into action, freed the slaves, and reunified the country. One week after the war ended in April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot and killed the president at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. Of the Lincolns’ four children, only the oldest, Robert, lived to be an adult. Their next two children, Edward and William, died in childhood. Tad, the youngest, was eighteen when he caught a “severe cold,” possibly pneumonia, and passed away in 1871.

Now, I’m an apolitical person (which I realize is its own kind of misleading political posture, but I think you know what I mean). I do not have conventional political affiliations. I follow presidential elections the same way I follow the NFL playoffs: obsessively and dispassionately. But Sarah Palin was (and is) a real problem. Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

Abe was awful lazy . . . he was always reading and thinking—

Their presence means that your thoughts are heard, prayers are being answered, and that miracles can unfold. I have a lot of respect for Abe Lincoln, and I’ve always liked when he said, “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” I can only hope that my gift will continue to help you fill your years with faith, happiness, laughter, and an abundance of love.

any time I feel like quitting, I just look at a framed poster I have hanging in our office: • He failed in business in ’31. • He ran as a state legislator and lost in ’32. • He tried business again in ’33 and failed again. • His sweetheart died in ’35. • He had a nervous breakdown in ’36. • He ran for state elector in ’40 after he regained his health. • He was defeated for Congress in ’43, defeated again for Congress in ’48, defeated when he ran for Senate in ’55 and defeated for vice presidency of the United States in ’56. • He ran for Senate again in ’58 and lost. • This man never quit. He kept trying till the last. In 1860, this man—Abraham Lincoln—was elected president of the United States. I want to be like Abe Lincoln. As my dad always says, “Shoot for the stars, and you just might land on the moon.

From the Bridge” The Importance of History Not all that many years ago the Importance of history would have been a “no brainer!” People understood that there was very little new under the sun, and history was a good barometer to the future. “Those that fail to heed history are doomed to repeat it, “was an adage frequently heard. It gave us a perspective by which to stabilize our bearings and allowed us to find one of the few ways by which we could understand who we are. The myth that George Washington, not being able to lie, admitted to chopping down his father’s favorite cherry tree helped us create a moral compass. Abraham Lincoln’s moniker “Honest Abe,” took root when he worked as a young store clerk in New Salem, IL. The name stuck before he became a lawyer or a politician. His writings show that he valued honesty and in 1859 when he ran for the presidency the nickname became his campaign slogan. However, apparently ”Honest Abe” did lie about whether he was negotiating with the South to end the war and also knowingly concealed some of the most lethal weapons ever devised during the Civil War." These however, were very minor infractions when compared to what we are now expected to believe from our politicians. Since World War II the pace of life has moved faster than ever and may actually have overrun our ability to understand the significance and value of our own honesty. We no longer turn to our past for guidance regarding the future; rather we look into our future in terms of what we want and how we will get it. We have developed to the point that we are much smarter than our ancestors and no longer need their morality and guidance. What we don’t know we frequently fabricate and in most cases, no one picks up on it and if they do, it really doesn’t seem to matter. In short the past has become outdated, obsolete and therefore has become largely irrelevant to us. Being less informed about our past is not the result of a lack of information or education, but of ambivalence and indifference. Perhaps history belongs to the ages but not to us. To a great extent we as a people really do not believe that history matters very much, if at all. My quote “History is not owned solely by historians. It is part of everyone’s heritage,” was written for the opening page of my award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba.” Not only is it the anchor holding our Ship of State firmly secure, it is the root of our very being. Yes, history is important. In centuries past this statement would have been self-evident. Our predecessors devoted much time and effort in teaching their children history and it helped provide the foundation to understanding who they were. It provided them a reference whereby they could set their own life’s goals. However society has, to a great extent, turned its back on the past. We now live in an era where the present is most important and our future is being built on shifting sand. We, as a people are presently engaged in a struggle for economic survival and choose to think of ourselves in terms of where wind and tide is taking us, rather than where we came from. We can no longer identify with our ancestors, thus they are no longer relevant. Their lives were so different from our own that they no longer can shed any light on our experience or existence. Therefore, in the minds of many of us, the past no longer has the value it once had nor do we give it the credence it deserves. As in war, the truth is the first victim; however this casualty threatens the very fabric of our being. When fact and fiction are interchanged to satisfy the moment, the bedrock of history in undermined. When we depend on the truth to structure our future, it is vital that it be based on truthful history and the honesty of those who write it. It is a crime without penalty when our politicians tell us lies. In fact they are often shamefully rewarded; encouraging them to become even more blatant in the lies they tell.

You need to inspire confidence   During the war, many politicians and businessmen would visit with the soldiers at the military hospitals. One gentleman visiting the military hospital in Washington couldn’t help overhearing a wounded soldier talking loudly and laughing about President Lincoln. The man followed the trail of laughter to the wounded soldier, and told him, “You must be slightly wounded?” “Yes,” replied the soldier, “very slightly – I have only lost one leg, and I’d be glad enough to lose the other, if I could hear some more of “Old Abe’s” stories.

I stared in awe at the Lincoln Memorial. If Honest Abe had come to life and somehow managed to lift his bony twenty-three-foot, four-inch frame from his throne, what would he say? What would he do? Would he break-dance? Would he pitch pennies against the curbside? Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy, that the people he freed were now slaves to rhythm, rap, and predatory lending, and that today his skill set would be better suited to the basketball court than the White House?

Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books...but also give him quiet time to ponder to eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun and the flowers on a green hillside. Teach him it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat.

An Appreciation of the Udder by Stewart Stafford Abe Lincoln borrowed Mabel Brown's bra, The bustiest gal in the county by far, Stretched it right back as far it would go, Launched himself up, a skyrocketing crow. He soared up so high, he couldn't believe it, Saw an aerial shot of Mabel's mighty cleavage, Birds wondered about the youthful intruder, Touched the dark rim of space, no blue there. Gravity tapped Honest Abe on the shoulder, He fell back to earth like a tumbling boulder, Broke his rapid fall by grabbing onto a tree, Exhilarated at the thought of skyward liberty. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

Mr Abe Lincoln if you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you you god or mighty god dam sunnde of a bith go to hell and buss my Ass suck my prick and call my Bolics your uncle Dick god dam a fool and goddam Abe Lincoln who would like you goddam you excuse me for using such

Abe Lincoln once remarked that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

After a long life, and a tumultuous presidency, Donald J Trump dies and arrives at the Gates of Heaven, where he sees a huge wall of clocks behind him. He asks an angel, "What are all those clocks?" The angel answers, "Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone on Earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie the hands on your clock will move." "Oh," says Trump, "whose clock is that?" "That's Washington's clock. The hands have never moved, indicating that he never told a lie." "Tremendous" says Trump. "And whose clock is that one?" The angel responds, "That's Abraham Lincoln's clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life." "So, where's my clock?" Asks Trump "Oh, your clock is in God's office. He's using it as a ceiling fan.

In Emerson’s words, “A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him.

In 1820, Americans spent $ 12 million on liquor, an amount that exceeded the total expenditure of the US government.

As Lincoln later told a friend, “I don’t like to hear cut-and-dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!

Poetry became his favorite genre; he memorized poetic lyrics and recited them often. For him, poetry organized and crystalized experience as no other type of language did.

Lincoln once said that his father taught him how to work but not how to enjoy it.

girl!

the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, . . . it all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany, . . . formless, has no terrible & no beautiful condensation.

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

when we die, we go bye-bye

being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Mr. Lincoln jumped out, ran back, and lifted the little pigs out of the mud and water and placed them on the bank. When he returned, his companion remarked: “Now, Abe, where does selfishness come in on this little episode?” “Why, bless your soul, Ed, that was the very essence of selfishness. I should have had no peace of mind all day had I gone on and left that suffering old sow worrying over those pigs. I did it to get peace of mind, don’t you see?” Under this view, our moral actions—our so-called moral actions—are just attempts to avoid the pain of guilt or worry.

Extraordinary things happen in the blink of an eye - birth, death, and everything in between passes by, leaving traces like shadows upon the soul. The unexpected can be fantastic or terrifying, and we could never have suspected the utter horror that unfolded before our eyes; there was no such laughter tonight. The stoic figure in the theater box above us cast a warm and just glow on all beneath. He was the peacemaker, the quiet hero, the reuniter of lost brothers and healer of broken homes, but never a reveler. Our collective awe was unmistakable, but he would not keep it for himself.