Stephen B. Oates

“Screaming at misguided people, Lincoln believed, was not the way to correct their wrongs. As he put it later, you won people to your side through “persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion,” making friends with them, appealing to their reason, gently telling them that they were only hurting themselves by their follies. For it was “an old true maxim,” Lincoln contended, “that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” But if you assailed, damned, and vilified the misled, they would shut you off and lash back.”
― Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln

“The legitimate object of government,” he later asserted, “is ‘to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”
― Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln