With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

And that would be an incalculable disaster, an irreparable blow to human liberty. For the Founding Fathers had staked their lives—and their destinies—on “an undecided experiment” in popular government, to show a skeptical world that people could govern themselves.

And it was up to Americans of his time, through an abiding respect for the law, to defend popular government from the tyranny of the mob.

Lincoln liked to quote what a Kentuckian once told him, that “its been my experience that folks who have no vices have generally very few virtues.”

Clay loved the United States “partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature.