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These words from former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern are primarily taken from a Jan. 27 interview with staff columnist Jeri Rowe. Also included are words from his 2009 book, “Abraham Lincoln’’ and quotes he gave in August and September during interviews with the Times Union of Albany, N.Y., The Daily Reporter-Herald of Loveland, Colo., and Easy Reader in Hermosa Beach., Calif.

I wrote the book in long-hand.

I’ve done that with every book I’ve written. I write on these lined, yellow legal pads, and then I find a willing secretary to type it and send it off to the publisher.

But as for picking Abraham Lincoln, I thought he was our greatest president.

He was the best writer we had in the White House, possibly with the exception of Thomas Jefferson or Woodrow Wilson. And I wanted to see what I could find researching his life.

I read all of his speeches and many of his letters, as well as any secondary literature, newspaper accounts and contemporary news accounts of the period. And what that all showed me was that he had a vision for America.

He once said rather humbly he never had a thought politically that didn’t stem from the Declaration of Independence, which was written by Jefferson. But he did come up with pretty good phrases.

Like with his first and second Inauguration and the Gettysburg Address. Who has improved the phrase, “Of the people, by the people, for the people’’? Who has improved on that? That is the way democracy should work.

Just a great phrase-maker. And that made it enjoyable reading some of the things he’d written. Like his letters to the families of fallen soldiers during the Civil War. They were very touching.

He had this one he wrote to a widow who lost several sons. A famous letter. Read it, and you could feel his pathos as a father, as a family man. It just shone through.

And it was a simple letter. Nothing fancy. But you knew it was out of his heart, and I saw that in several of his letters. He was a very compassionate man.

But he was an imperfect man.

His suspension of habeas corpus (during the Civil War), that was a mistake. It was a violation of the Constitution, and when you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, “Except in wartime.”

And I don’t see how that contributed anything to the war effort, and it was a blemish on his record.

Also, he had what we call today clinical depression. He was miserable with it. And he suffered. He considered suicide several times, and as I said (at UNCG) he quit carrying a pocket knife for fear of cutting his throat in one of these moments of deep despondency.

His law partner said that, at one point to watch Lincoln walk across their office on some days, you could almost see his melancholy drip from him as he walked.

Various factors could have contributed to his depression: heredity, deaths in the family, business failures, election defeats, even bad weather. His law partner, William Herndon, reported that Lincoln believed he might have contracted syphilis in 1835 or 1836.

If so, this might account for some of his anxiety about marriage. Many of the men in Lincoln’s time had some kind of sexually transmitted disease or feared that they did.

Whatever’s the case, his sad countenance, reflecting on his internal depression, doubtless touched the hearts of many voters who came to love and admire the tall, lean, sad-faced man from Illinois.

Yet, what surprised me most about my research was how shrewd he was as a politician. Just by the way he handled so many complicated problems.

And always with an eye to how far public opinion would permit him to go. That’s the reason he wasn’t an abolitionist. He knew the country wasn’t ready for the total abolition of slavery, and he didn’t want to alienate the border states, some of whom had slaves.

I thought that he handled that issue and many others very shrewdly from a political standpoint.

And if he would’ve lived, I think he would’ve done a better job at handling Reconstruction. He had no malice towards the South.

He said to his cabinet several times, “Let’s let ’em up easy when this is all over,” and this compassion — and his magnanimous spirit — would have ensured a more even peaceful reconstruction.

And what that showed me was that he was a broad-based man. He knew about the weaknesses of people. But he always treated them with respect, whether they were friend or foe from that standpoint. That added to his greatness as a human being.

In my book, I wrote that he could stir the “better angels’’ of the American people. He got that line from Secretary of State (William) Seward.

He read his speeches to Seward frequently before he gave them, and one time Seward said something to the effect, “One paragraph ends kinda flat. What do you think of saying here, ‘Until such time as the better angels of our nature’?”

That’s where he got it. And that’s what we need to learn from Lincoln as a nation. His integrity. That was the number one thing, and his intelligence in spite of the lack of formal education.

With only a little over a year’s education … he showed that by reading, reading, reading you can enlarge your wisdom, insights and knowledge. Also, by writing — writing, writing, writing. He wrote all his life, became very skillful with English diction and was able to write the greatest addresses of any president.

So, I tell students when I’m talking about my book, “If you’re not satisfied with your education, remember what Abraham Lincoln did.” You can start to read in an intelligent way.

Look at suggestions on “Good Books To Read.” You can exercise some care when you write a letter. Don’t just slap it down. That’s one great thing Lincoln can teach everybody of all ages.

He had this capacity to envision a greater nation, a greater Republic. I think all of those things we can learn from Lincoln.

If he saw our political system today, I think he would be discouraged by it. It’s too bitter, too partisan, too negative. Not enough cooperation. And not enough old-fashioned decency.

Lincoln never talked the way some political figures do today. He didn’t manifest sheer hatred and contempt for the opposition. He tried to reason with people.

But fear and anger have always sold pretty well. Nixon used to say, “People don’t vote on faith; they vote on fear.” And what that does to our nation, it cheapens it. It cheapens our politics and misleads people.

Like this guy Karl Rove. He’s a menace. I think he has poisoned the American politics more than any other single individual, and I believe that. Just the way he has coached candidates into destroying an opponent with a clever use of fear and negativism.

And the big guy on the radio — ­Rush Limbaugh — I’d put him pretty close to Public Enemy No. 1.

Now, I don’t say President Obama is perfect, but he’s doing the best he knows how. We can’t get the Republicans to agree with anything except going to Afghanistan on a larger scale. I’m not a pacifist. I was a bomber and proud of it, but I don’t support unnecessary wars.

And I would tell him, “Mr. President, be cautious about committing young men and women of this country to wars of doubtful validity.”

You know, I never thought I would say this, but I’d rather have Nixon in the White House than Bush and Cheney. I thought (2000-08) were the worst in terms of federal leadership.

 But the best was Lincoln. He saved the Union. That was his great achievement.

 A lesser leader might have done two things: left us with slavery for a long time, and left us with a divided country. I don’t know what we’d call ourselves. We now say the United States of America. That’s what Lincoln preserved.