Leadership Quote by Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln frames ambition as a universal human force but redirects it from hunger for office or glory to the harder task of becoming worthy of respect. The pivot of the sentence is the phrase "by rendering myself worthy of their esteem". Esteem is not begged or manufactured; it is earned as the consequence of character and usefulness. He makes cause and effect explicit: the aim is not applause, it is merit, with public regard following only if merited.

The line comes from 1832, when a 23-year-old Lincoln announced his candidacy for the Illinois legislature to the voters of Sangamon County. With little formal schooling, few connections, and no wealth, he could not promise patronage or dazzle with pedigree. He offered instead a frontier ethic: work hard, tell the truth, serve the community, and let neighbors judge. In a young republic wary of demagogues, this was not mere modesty; it was a political philosophy grounded in civic virtue. He signals that ambition, which he elsewhere recognized as dangerous when unbounded, must be harnessed to public good and measured by the community’s sober verdict.

The wording "truly esteemed" matters. It distinguishes durable respect from the counterfeit of popularity. To be truly esteemed is to be trusted precisely because one has subordinated self-interest to duty. By making worthiness the condition for honor, he proposes a democratic reciprocity: citizens owe esteem to those who earn it; aspirants owe effort, honesty, and competence to earn that esteem.

Read across his life, the statement doubles as a method. He advanced not by grasping but by preparing, studying law, mastering argument, and accepting responsibility. Even at the presidency’s pinnacle, he sought to merit confidence through restraint, reasoned appeals, and costly choices. The sentence captures an ethic that makes personal ambition safe for a republic: let the desire to be esteemed drive the labor to deserve it.