Political Quotes

“in her book ``Team of Rivals,'' Doris Kearns Goodwin tells a story that illustrates the extraordinary, transcendent power of Abraham Lincoln's faith in human freedom and democracy. It is a story about something that occurred in 1908, 100 years ago. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had been entertaining some Caucasus tribesmen for hours with tales of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon. When he finished, a chief stood and asked Tolstoy to speak about the greatest of all heroes, a man who ``spoke with a voice of thunder . . . laughed like a sunrise and his deeds were as strong as the rock.'' Tell them, the chief implored, about Abraham Lincoln. Tolstoy would later write, ``That little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world. . . . He was not a great general like Washington or Napoleon; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great, but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character. ``Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman. But Lincoln,'' Tolstoy wrote, ``was a humanitarian as broad as the world.'' Today marks the 199th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. This past weekend was also the official opening of a 2-year bicentennial celebration of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial.”