Abraham Lincoln

The 2016 Republican National Convention continues today.  Some of the speakers surprise me with what they are saying.  For instance, Doctor Ben Carson... obviously a nice person, who has saved many lives during his remarkable career.  But (IMHO) Ben has got it all wrong.  His rant against Hillary was disjointed, often incorrect and just plain mean.  I predict that a year from now, he will be regretting his backing of Mr. Trump.  Wait and see.

Meanwhile, to offset the nonsense that I feel current Convention Republicans are spewing, I look to a famous Republican,  Abraham Lincoln. Brant House put together a book called: "Lincoln's Wit."  In the introduction to the book, he quotes Carl Schurz' tribute to Lincoln:

"No American President had ever spoken words like these to the American people.  America never had a President who found such words in the depths of his heart."  

Can I have an "AMEN" to that?

Here are a few of those "Lincoln words."

1835  "You may burn my body to ashes, and scatter them to the winds of heaven;  you may drag my soul down to the regions of darkness and despair to be tormented forever; but you will never get me to support a measure which I believe to be wrong, although by doing so I may accomplish that which I believe to be right."

1837  "There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law."

1842  "In very truth he was the noblest work of God - an honest man."

Lincoln, while a member of Congress, took his stand against the Mexican War.  He declared that those who argued that the war was not a war of aggression made him think of the Illinois farmer who said:  "I ain't greedy about land, I only want what joins mine."

1847?  "To lay a duty for the improvement of any particular harbor upon the tonnage coming into that harbor will never clear a greatly obstructed river.  That idea that we could involves the same absurdity as that of the Irish bull and his new boots. 'I shall never get 'em on,' said Patrick. 'till I wear 'em a day or two and stretch 'em a little.'"

1852  "Pharaoh's country was cursed with plagues and his hosts were lost in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred  years.  May like disasters never befall us."

1855  Some of Mr. Lincoln's friends were arguing and asked Abe for his opinion.  The question was: What is the proper length of a man's leg?    Mr. Lincoln reflected a while and then said: "I should think that it ought to be long enough  to reach from his body to the ground."

1856  "We will hereafter speak for freedom and against slavery as long as the constitution guarantees free speech;  until everywhere on this wide land the sun shall shine and the rain shall fall and the wind shall blow upon no man who goes forth to unrequited toil."

Lincoln's remarks about an orator: "His sophism was as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death."

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.   This expresses my idea of democracy.  Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."

"It's a fortunate thing I wasn't born a woman, for I cannot refuse anything."

"It is said that an Eastern monarch once charged his  wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations.  They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away."  How much it expresses!  How chastening to the hour of pride!  How consoling in the depths of affliction."

(I always thought that this was said by Saint Theresa.  This phrase got me through almost three years of excruciating leg pain.  That, and help from Elaine Lottes.)

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