"Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us."

“Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.”

“I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.”

“His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.”

“On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.”

“In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.”

“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.”