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 strengt...
Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.
Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one’s little cares and difficulties disappear into nothing.
Tolstoy went on to observe,This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great th...
To illustrate the marked atmospheric contrast between the two cities, the writer Frank Carpenter observed that in New York, a streetcar will not wait for you if you are not just at its stopping point....
Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor
This, then, is a story of Lincoln’s political genius revealed through his extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to rep...
This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians ci...
They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper’s Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. In the early days, Fanny recalled, we all delighted i...
There was never any doubt that the local jury would return a guilty verdict. In due time, gentlemen of the jury, Seward concluded, when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here...
There was a hush and everybody was holding their breath, Frances Perkins recalled. After what seemed a long-drawn moment of tension, he reached the rostrum, handed off his crutches, gripped the lecter...
There is now nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I loved who have gone before me.
The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.
The more you read about a subject, he advised me, the more interesting it will seem.
Our party, he declared, stands for the right of property and the right of liberty, for institutions that have stood the test of time, and for an economic system that rewards energy, courage, enterpris...
Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.
No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-...
Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril;
It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.
It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed, Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams in the midst of the American Revolution, sug...