Lincoln By David Herbert Donald Quotes & Sayings

In Lincoln's day a President's religion was a very private affair. There were no public prayer meetings, no attempts to woo the Religious Right. Few of Lincoln's countrymen knew anything at all of his religious beliefs. — David Herbert Donald

I have this great test to see if a girl's a real friend. When we're shopping I'll pick out an outfit that I know looks hot and one that is awful. If my friend says the bad one looks good, I know she's not a good friend. — Paris Hilton

God has two dwellings; one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart. — Izaak Walton

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.' — Stacy Schiff

Strip away the usual hot air, and bin Laden's audiotape is the sign of a seriously weakened man. — Fareed Zakaria

The more I have studied Lincoln, the more I have followed his thought processes, the more I am convinced that he understood leadership better than any other American president. — David Herbert Donald

I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today. — David Herbert Donald

Jesus wastes none of our stories, even our tales of woe. He transforms them into epic adventures where we dare to face our past for the sake of our present. — Mary E. DeMuth

Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position. — Brian Tracy

When I look up at the clouds I see so many animals, mostly sheep who have lost their limbs and heads. — Demetri Martin

Douglas claimed that in his New Salem days Lincoln "could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together" - a charge that was not merely inaccurate but singularly inappropriate from a senator known to have a fondness for drink - and Lincoln jeered that Douglas's popular-sovereignty doctrine was "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death. — David Herbert Donald

And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that! — David Herbert Donald

At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago. — David Herbert Donald

Lincoln had no such person that he could talk with. Often, as a result, he debated with himself, and he would draw up a kind of list of the pros and cons of an argument, and carefully figure them out, and he might test them in public. — David Herbert Donald

But Golden's dark form in the doorway had imprinted something new and painful on the hard plates of her chest: that old devil, hope. The kind of hope that abandons you in your worst moments and is suddenly there again, weeks later, trailing you like the stubborn, slinking dog who will not take no for an answer. The kind of greedy hope that tricks you into believing that at least some of the things taken from you might be restored, that after everything, you might find your way back to something like happiness. — Brady Udall

Inside a soul, there's a hero to discover — David Guetta

I'll treasure every day that I have with you. For I've known what life was like before you and..and since you, and as far as I'm concerned, these are two different lives. And one makes me so very much happier that the other. — John Shors

I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him. — David Herbert Donald

Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes. — David Herbert Donald

If I've got a Dad, and his name is Wormwood Rot, and he's in some heavy metal rock band called Grave Dirt ... then I'm definitely meeting him!
She stares at me awkwardly, and I'm about to ask again - maybe even insist - when she says, Honey, why do you think he's on the news? Wormwood, I mean ... your father? Becca, he's ... dead. — Rusty Fischer

The sky was white but deteriorating fast. As always, it was becoming an enormous drop sheet. Blood was bleeding through, and in patches, the clouds were dirty, like footprints in melting snow.
Footprints? you ask.
Well, I wonder whose those could be. — Markus Zusak

But having said all of that, that still doesn't account for a lot of the increase in popularity which stems, I think, from Lincoln's personal characteristics. — David Herbert Donald

What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them. — David Herbert Donald

If Europe could figure out a way to do the euro, I feel confident we can do this. — Mindy Kaling

They jogged along in silence, Jem playing with the thong of the whip, and Mary aware of his hands beside her. She glanced down at them out of the tail of her eye, and she saw they were long and slim; they had the same strength, the same grace, as his brother's. These attracted her; the others repelled her. She realised for the first time that aversion and attraction ran side by side; that the boundary line was thin between them. The thought was an unpleasant one, and she shrank from it. Supposing this had been Joss beside her ten, twenty years ago? She shuttered the comparison at the back of her mind, fearing the picture it conjured. She knew now why she hated her uncle. — Daphne Du Maurier

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that. — David Herbert Donald

He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave. — Alexis De Tocqueville

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship. — David Herbert Donald

We hurt each other too well to let it drop — Junot Diaz

I think, with the gay liberation movement has had need for heroes and heroines, and it would be rather nice to have Abraham Lincoln as your poster boy, wouldn't it? — David Herbert Donald