## Metadata - Author: [[Jordan Ellenberg]] - Full Title: Shape - Category: #books ## Highlights - Here’s the Reverend Gulliver again, recalling Lincoln recalling his childhood: I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me, for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south, and bounded it east and bounded it west. Perhaps that accounts for the characteristic you observe in my speeches. ([Location 302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08PF965W9&location=302)) - For Lincoln, unlike Jefferson, the Euclidean style isn’t something belonging to the gentleman or the possessor of a formal education, because Lincoln was neither. It’s a hand-hewn log cabin of the mind. Built properly, it can withstand any challenge. And anybody, in the country Lincoln conceived, can have one. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08PF965W9&location=311)) - The paradox of education: what we most admire we put in a box and make dull. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08PF965W9&location=320)) - what made Lincoln special was that “it was morally impossible for Lincoln to argue dishonestly; he could no more do it than he could steal; it was the same thing to him in essence, to despoil a man of his property by larceny, or by illogical or flagitious reasoning.” What Lincoln had taken from Euclid (or what, already existing in Lincoln, harmonized with what he found in Euclid) was integrity, the principle that one does not say a thing unless one has justified, fair and square, that one has the right to say it. Geometry is a form of honesty. ([Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08PF965W9&location=389))