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“Lincoln, who enjoyed less than one year of formal schooling, was essentially self-educated. He read widely in nineteenth-century political economy, including the works of the British apostle of economic liberalism John Stuart Mill and the Americans Henry Carey and Francis Wayland. Although these writers differed on specific policies—Carey was among the most prominent advocates of a high tariff while Wayland favored free trade—all extolled the virtues of entrepreneurship and technological improvement in a modernizing market economy. (Wayland, the president of Brown University and a polymath who published works on ethics, religion, and philosophy, made no direct reference to slavery in his 400-page tome, Elements of Political Economy, but did insist that people did not work productively unless allowed to benefit from their own labor, an argument Lincoln would reiterate in the 1850s.)”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Living in an age of casual sex, serial commitments, and frequent divorce, we are all in danger of becoming as jaded as anceien regime aristocrats. Does the notion of undying love still have any meaning for us today?”
― Marilyn Yalom, How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance – A Literary and Cultural History Across the Centuries

“A Northern teacher in Florida reported how one sixty-year-old woman, “just beginning to spell, seems as if she could not think of any thing but her book, says she spells her lesson all the evening, then she dreams about it, and wakes up thinking about it.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Like his idol Henry Clay, Lincoln saw government as an active force promoting opportunity and advancement. Its “legitimate object,” he wrote in an undated memorandum, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do…for themselves.” He offered as examples building roads and public schools and providing relief to the poor. To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.13”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery