A Team of Rivals

A Team of Rivals
Doris Kearns Goodwin

Lincoln: “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgement, is not the sole question…A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, can not be safely disregarded.”
pg. 206

“When he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation “crimination with crimination and anathema with anathema”
pg. 168

“Like the ancient Greeks, Lincoln seemed to believe that “ideas of a person’s worth are tied to the way others, both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him.”
pg. 100

“He wisely sought the middle ground between the statements of radical republican…and conservative republicans…He acknowledged that brown had displayed “great courage” and “rare unselfishness” none the less, he concluded, “That connot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right”
pg. 228

“Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another contex many years later that “Grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem to extravagant to endure.”
pg. 355

“In great contests” he wrote in a fragment found amoung his papers, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.”