Leadership Quote by Abraham Lincoln

Ambition, in Lincoln's hands, gets stripped of its usual costume - conquest, wealth, legacy - and made to stand there in plain clothes: a desire to be "truly esteemed". The line is doing two things at once. It admits ambition (a vice in much 19th-century moral rhetoric) while laundering it through humility and service. He doesn't deny wanting recognition; he insists the only recognition worth having must be earned by worthiness. It's self-interest rewritten as civic duty.

The subtext is a young politician auditioning for trust. "Every man is said..". opens with folk wisdom, a modest, almost homespun preface that lowers the temperature before the real claim lands. Then comes the quiet pivot: "I can say for one". He frames his own drive as an exception that actually flatters the audience. Their esteem becomes the currency, and he makes himself dependent on it - not through charm, but through conduct. That dependency is strategic. In a democracy, authority isn't inherited; it's granted. Lincoln is signaling he understands the terms.

Context sharpens the stakes. This comes from his early lyceum-era writing and speeches, when the American republic felt both promising and brittle - vulnerable to demagoguery, faction, and what he elsewhere called "the mobocratic spirit". By tying ambition to being "worthy", Lincoln is preemptively fencing off the suspicion that political hunger equals moral danger. It's rhetoric as moral contract: judge me, but only by the standards that keep the republic intact.