Lincoln (2012)

Sally Field: Mary Todd Lincoln

Photos 

Quotes 

• Abraham Lincoln : I ought to have done it, I ought have done for Tad's sake! For everybody goddamned sake! I should've clapped you in the madhouse!

  Mary Todd Lincoln : Then do it! Do it! Don't you threaten me,you do it this time! Lock me away! You'll have to, I swear if Robert is killed!

• Mary Todd Lincoln : Seward can't do it; you must. Because if you fail to acquire the necessary votes, woe unto you, sir. You will answer to me.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : All anyone will remember of me is I was crazy and I ruined your happiness.

  Abraham Lincoln : Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand, Molly.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : When they look at you, at what it cost to live at the heart of this, they'll wonder at it. They'll wonder at you. They should. But they should also look at the wretched woman by your side, if they want to understand what this was truly like, for an ordinary person, for anyone other than you.

  Abraham Lincoln : You must try to be happier. We must, both of us. We've been so miserable for so long.

• Abraham Lincoln : It's nighttime. Ship's move by some terrible power at terrific speed. And though it's imperceptible in the darkness, I have an intuition that we're headed towards a shore. No one else seems to be aboard the vessel. I'm very keenly aware of my aloneness.

  Abraham Lincoln : [quoting Hamlet]  "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

  Abraham Lincoln : Hmm. I reckon it's the speed that's strange to me. I'm used to going at a deliberate pace. I should space you, Molly. I shouldn't tell you my dreams.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : I don't want to be spared if you aren't And you spare me nothing.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : No one is loved as much as you by the people. Don't waste that power.

• Abraham Lincoln : Seward doesn't want me leaving big muddy footprints all over town.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : No one has ever lived who knows better than you the proper placement of footfalls on treacherous paths.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : Smile, Senator Wade.

  Senator Bluff Wade : I believe I am smiling, Mrs. Lincoln.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : You think I'm ignorant of what you're up to because you haven't discussed this scheme with me as you ought to have done? When have I ever been so easily bamboozled? I believe you when you insist that amending the Constitution and abolishing slavery will end this war. And since you're sending my son into the war, woe to you if you fail to pass the amendment.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : [to Thaddeus Stevens]  The past is the past, it's a new year now and we are all getting along, or so they tell me. I gather we are working together! The White House and the other House? Hatching little plans together?

  Robert Lincoln : [Robert leans in quietly]  Mother.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : What?

  Robert Lincoln : You're creating a bottleneck.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : Oh!

  [to Stevens] 

  Mary Todd Lincoln : Oh, I'm detaining you, and more important, the people behind you! How the people love my husband. They flock to see him by their thousands on public days. They will never love you the way they love him. How difficult it must be for you to know that, and yet how important to remember it.

  [Mary gives Stephens a slight, lethal smile. He holds the look; his poker-face yields to a barely perceptible smile, bemused and perhaps a little admiring] 

• Thaddeus Stevens : As long as your household accounts are in order, Madam, we'll have no need to investigate them.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : You have always taken such a *lively*, even prosecutorial interest in my household accounts.

  Thaddeus Stevens : Your household accounts have always been so interesting.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : Yes, thank you, it's true. The miracles I have wrought out of fertilizer bills and cutlery invoices, but I had to. Four years ago, when the President and I arrived, this was a pure pigsty. Tobacco stains in the Turkey carpets, mushrooms, green as the moon, sprouting from the ceilings. And a pauper's pittance allotted for improvements. As if your committee joined with all of Washington awaiting, in what you anticipated to be our comfort in squalor, further proof that my husband and I were prairie primitives, unsuited to the position to which an error of the people, a flaw in the democratic process, had elevated us.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : It was an attempted assassination.

  Abraham Lincoln : It was most probably an accident.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : It was an assassin whose intended target was you.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : It's the amendment to abolish slavery. Why else would you force me to invite demented radicals into my home?

• Mary Todd Lincoln : You tell me dreams, that's all. I'm your soothsayer. That's all I am to you any more. I'm not to be trusted.

• Abraham Lincoln : How are the plans coming along for the big shindy?

  Mary Todd Lincoln : I don't want to talk about parties. You don't care about parties.

  Abraham Lincoln : Not much, but they're a necessary hindrance.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : Oh, gracious saints.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : Praise heavens, praise heavens. Just when I had abandoned hope of amusement, it's the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

  Thaddeus Stevens : Mrs Lincoln.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : Madame President, if you please. Don't convene another subcommittee to investigate me, sir. I'm teasing.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : The war will take our son. A sniper, or a shrapnel shell, or typhus same as took Willie. It takes hundreds of boys a day. He'll die uselessly. And how will I ever forgive you?

• Mary Todd Lincoln : Who'd ever have guessed that old nightmare capable of such control? He might make a politician someday.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : If I refuse to take the high road? If I won't pick up the rough old cross, will you threaten me again with the madhouse? As you did when I couldn't stop crying over Willie. When I showed you what heartbreak, *real* heartbreak, looked like. And you hadn't the courage, to countenance, to help me.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : Most men, their firstborn is their favorite. You've always blamed Robert for being born. For trapping you in a marriage that's only ever given you grief and caused you regret.

• Mary Todd Lincoln : You've an itch to travel?

  Abraham Lincoln : I'd like that. To the West, by rail.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : Overseas.

  Abraham Lincoln : The Holy Land.

  Mary Todd Lincoln : Awfully pious for a man who takes his wife out buggy-riding on Good Friday.

  Abraham Lincoln : Jerusalem. Where David and Solomon walked. I dream of walking in that ancient city.