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BILL MOYERS: We always encourage you to share your thoughts with us online and you always oblige. Spirited discussions fill our email box and blog pages. So we'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some of the comments that recently caught our eye.

Sam Waterston and Harold Holzer showed us the arc of Abraham Lincoln's life through the words of writers ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Allen Ginsberg.

SAM WATERSTON: Let the Railsplitter Awake!
Let Lincoln come with his axe
and with his wooden plate
to eat with the farmworkers.

HAROLD HOLZER: No political leader, no political writer, not even Lincoln, can define his own place in the landscape of memory.

BILL MOYERS: Here is what some of you had to say.

ANNE LIN: Lincoln's suffering as a young man informed his life and character. It could be argued that he should have grown up to be an uneducated racist, but instead...He chose the positive...versus the easy and familiar. -Anne Lin

NIKINOMO: I don't know why Americans attempt to mythologize their dead presidents and turn them into undeserving heroes, while people of great accomplishments are ignored. People like Charles Sumner ...kept Lincoln's feet to the fire on emancipation even as Lincoln was firing generals who liberated blacks in conquered southern territory. -Nikinomo

ALAN ROCKMAN: Lincoln was still our greatest president despite the muddying up of his image and "love-hate" spin... We wouldn't have had an America left if it wasn't for his wisdom, courage, and humanity. -Alan Rockman

BILL MOYERS: Religious historian Karen Armstrong discussed her Charter for Compassion and evaluated the state of religion in the world today.

KAREN ARMSTRONG: To put the words "com" and "passion," means to feel with the other. To experience with the other. Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. If you don't like to be attacked, don't attack others.

JIM KNAPTON: Putting these three religions together as the framework for guidelines for your charter bothers me to no end... While you rightly claim at their hearts these religions preach the Golden Rule, by their actions they exclude it. -Jim Knapton

RAZA: The first step to any religion is to be a good human being. How can anyone be a good Muslim, Christian, Jew, Sikh, Hindu or atheist, when they are having a problem being a good human... -Raza

TARA MIDDLETON: I appreciated her statement about how we must also hear the pain among fundamentalists and how we should understand via the historical context of how they have felt attacked... I hope for more understanding & love in the world and less divisiveness. -Tara Middleton

BILL MOYERS: Simon Johnson and Michael Perino compared today's financial system with banks during the Great Depression

SIMON JOHNSON: These big finance houses and securities firms that merged with commercial banks, and vice versa, are incredibly powerful. And they have, you know, questionable practices in New York on and around Wall Street. They're also incredibly powerful in Washington. The strength of their connections possibly is even greater now than it was back in the early 1930's.

MICHAEL PERINO: If you look back at that period in the 1930's, you see banks taking on these kinds of market risks, and they're doing it with leverage. The same thing we're really seeing today.

MARY GODWIN: I think the genesis of "too big to fail" is that the banks own too much of our government to fail. -Mary Godwin

G. ARMSTRONG: Your program with Johnson and Perino ... failed to address the base cause of the recession - our failed U.S. Federal government democracy. They are motivated not by the good of the country but by political expedience. -G. Armstrong

D.C. EDDY: The essential nature of economics is the efficient exchange of goods and services to provide the needs and desires of the people of any and all societies. Economics is not a plaything that depends on whim, chance and random foolishness. - D. C. Eddy

BILL MOYERS: Keep telling us what you think of the Journal by mail, email or on the blog at PBS.org and we'll keep reading.

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