It's often said that leadership is the art of getting people to do what you want, and making them think it's what they want. This captures a lot of what Abraham Lincoln did.

What Thomas DiLorenzo misses is that the other abolitions were either very limited as in the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II or far away from the metropolitan center of those nations - the French and British abolitions were of slavery in the West Indies.

Stephen A.Douglas was a risk-taker by temperament; I expect that Lincoln - Douglas debates represented another risk he just couldn't resist. He lived to regret it.

The one who pursues revenge should dig two graves.

The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.

Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart.

Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to have solved the slavery problem by compensation - in fact, drew up a gradual, compensated emancipation plan as early as November, 1861 - but no slaveholders were willing to go along with it.