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"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."
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"Why have we built warships to bring home peace?"

"There isn't a viler creature on earth than a politician who sends the children of others to the war but not his own children!"

"There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again."

"A lot of blood,A lot of dead people,A lot of victims,A lot of useless battles,A lot of predictable battles, so far what's next?As far as now I suggest to change the road, it's too messy this road in which all are walking. Somebody will fall..."

"War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods."
Explore more quotes by David Herbert Donald


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story."


"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."


"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?"


"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."


"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."
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