“If Lincoln had been a failure, he would have lived a longer life.”

— James M. McPherson

James M. McPherson. Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (2008) "Epilogue"
2000s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If Lincoln had been a failure, he would have lived a longer life." by James M. McPherson?

James M. McPherson 27

American historian 1936

Related quotes

“Perhaps it was better for Mr. Lincoln's happiness that he died when he did. Had he lived, he would likely have been involved in bitter political feuds, owing to his liberal opinions in regard to the reconstruction of the States. He was of too sensitive a nature not to feel the shafts that would have been hurled at him by those whom he thought to be his friends, and he would not likely have been permitted to carry out his ideas. As it was, he died a martyr to a great cause, and venerated by all those who loved the Union; and while the names of many who held high places in the State will be forgotten, the memory of Abraham Lincoln will live in the hearts of his countrymen while the art of printing exists by which his name can be handed down to posterity.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 320

“Nothing, then, would prevent him henceforth from living his life, a purely secular life, according to his nature and his habits, without having to ask himself at every moment whether what he had done was displeasing to God or not. And since he was no longer the sinner whose life, as soon as he acted by his own powers, was but sin, he would be able to enumerate separately the sins which he had committed on a particular occasion.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 120

“He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 137
Identity (1998)

“He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, maybe even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”

Willa Cather book The Professor's House

Book III, Ch. 4
The Professor's House (1925)

“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

“If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.”

Abraham Pais (1918–2000) American Physicist

On the fate of his friend Lion Nordheim, who was executed ten days before the end of the war, and his own release at around the same time, p. 52
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: On the day we were caught, Lion and I had been talking about writing a memorandum on the fate of the Jewish war children living in hiding or among Dutch families … we were the representatives of the Zionist youth organization. … Lion who had been taking notes of the discussion, put these papers in his jacket pocket when he took a break from lunch. When the Germans caught us they discovered his notes. If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.