Anonymous Quotes

By God, that means nigger citizenship …. That will be the last speech Lincoln will ever make.

Men like Abraham Lincoln recognized that if the slaveholders were not stopped, it would only be a question of time until they spread their system of elite rule to the entire country. Poor men would be bound for life into menial labor, and American democracy would die.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

Lincoln's paper proclamation must now become iron, lead and fire.

It took America three-quarters of a century of agitation and four years of war to learn the meaning of the word "Liberty." God grant to teach us by easier lessons the meaning of the words, "equal rights.

America’s gun culture is an invented tradition. It was not present at the creation of America, whenever we fix that point. Rather, it developed in a single generation, among those who experienced the onset of the Civil War. All cultural attributes have a starting point, and a path of development. America’s gun culture is unusual only in that one can determine the precise period in which a specific artifact became central to a nation’s identity and self-conception. Prior to the 1860s, guns were not perceived as a significant component of America’s national identity, essential to its survival.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he turned the Civil War into a revolution.

America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.

Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."

In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts.

Elevate those guns a little lower.

The perfection of our union, especially our commitment to equality of opportunity, has been a story of constant striving to live up to our Founding principles. This is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, 'In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.'

If it wasn't for Abe Lincoln, I'd still be on the open market.

If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be turning over in his grave.

Is America truly a democracy? Has America ever been a democracy with the institution of slavery?

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

What I find most interesting about the U.S. is this idea of equality.

Messrs. Washington and Lincoln faced enormous difficulties, but they both gave their lives to make sure America survived.

The pervasiveness of guns in our society is destroying America.

The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.