Leadership Quote by Abraham Lincoln

“Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible” is Lincoln stripping leadership down to something almost unseemly: persistence as a physical act, closer to combat than committee work. The genius is in the animal imagery. A bulldog doesn’t negotiate; it locks its jaw and refuses to be moved. Lincoln, the lawyer-turned-war president, understood that moral clarity means little without the stamina to enforce it against pressure, fatigue, and public impatience.

The phrasing is deliberately rough. “Chew and choke” isn’t polite perseverance; it’s making an adversary’s life difficult, even miserable. That’s the subtext: when the stakes are existential, civility can become a luxury the cause can’t afford. Lincoln was famous for eloquence, but he also mastered the blunt backstage language of power. This line belongs to that register - a private pep talk for hard days when lofty rhetoric fails and the only virtue left is refusal.

Context matters. Lincoln’s presidency was an endurance test staged as a constitutional crisis: secession, battlefield catastrophe, political sabotage, and a fragile coalition that could collapse at any moment. “Hold on” reads as strategy as much as temperament. It’s aimed at allies as well as enemies - a warning not to let up, not to be lured into premature compromise, not to mistake exhaustion for wisdom.

There’s an uncomfortable modern ring to it: a reminder that progress often advances not by purity but by pressure, applied relentlessly until the opposition can’t breathe.