Booth

by Karen Joy Fowler

We cannot escape history. —Abraham Lincoln

In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

No girl knows she’s ugly until someone tells her so and every ugly girl remembers the someone who first told her.

Even in the old familiar places, in places you know and love, in your very home, peril is hidden like a serpent in the leaves.

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.”

He’s not yet done anything to make himself a man worth remembering and he’s determined not to die until he has.

This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure. —Abraham Lincoln, 1848

I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

For such as we are made of, such we be. —W. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together.

One may smile and smile and be a villain.

The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight;—I mean the harlot Slavery. —Charles Sumner

Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off a chicken and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me? —Abraham Lincoln

Not guilty by reason of hereditary insanity.

This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt. —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

You have asked for my advice. I really am not capable of advising you whether, in the providence of the Great Spirit, who is the great Father of us all, it is best for you to maintain the habits and customs of your race, or adopt a new mode of life. I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do . . . —Abraham Lincoln addressing the fourteen chiefs in Washington, DC, March 1863

We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves. The response was to suggest that the Sioux eat grass or their own dung. Defrauded of, at one estimate, nearly one hundred thousand dollars by dishonest agents and officials, and facing starvation, warriors attacked numerous settlements throughout the Minnesota River Valley. The surviving settlers spoke of unimaginable tortures and cruelties. Preoccupied by his other war, Lincoln did not send federal forces until early September.

What’s past is prologue. —W. Shakespeare, The Tempest