Aaron Dessner Quotes

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

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

Abraham Lincoln is the most powerful slave catcher in America.

Even the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

I grew up 60 minutes way from Richmond, in Charlottesville, Virginia and, as a child, I was obsessed with the Civil War. I used to do re-enactments and all that stuff.

The Emancipation Proclamation was really a tool of war.

You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.

When I read that I had to go to Gettysburg.

Abraham Lincoln - the spirit incarnate of those who won victory in the Civil War - was the true representative of this people, not only for his own generation, but for all time, because he was a man among men.

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

Everyone under the age of sixty called it the War Between the States, while everyone over sixty called it the War of Northern Aggression, as if somehow the North had baited the South into war over a bad bale of cotton.Read

If the states had to vote on slavery, we would have lost the vote.

Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president.

Presidents in wartime, embattled presidents, unpopular presidents, they all look to Lincoln. He's their patron saint because no president was more embattled or more unpopular than Lincoln was during his presidency. We think he was born on Mount Rushmore. Not so.

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.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

I walked out of Spielberg's 'Lincoln' having such a thirst for more. It used such a microscopic albeit enormous event in American history. It used such a small piece of his presidency to illustrate him as a president through the lens of that event.

My feeling about him is that the America that we have today, the freedoms we enjoy and the privileges we have, are really the reflection of Abe Lincoln's convictions, his vision, and his toughness.

I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican.

'Lincoln' is a powerful film. It's one of those epic films that talk about this very specific issue in history of the United States.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War - when I really think about them, they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.