Abraham Lincoln Quotes

While the people retain their virtue and vigilence no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable and sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?

~ Abraham Lincoln

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.

~ Abraham Lincoln

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

~ Abraham Lincoln

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I'm a slow walker but I never walk back.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Every man over forty is responsible for his face.

~ Abraham Lincoln

When you have got an elephant by the hind leg and he is trying to run away it is best to let him run.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is but it does not admit of holidays.

~ Abraham Lincoln

That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

~ Abraham Lincoln

The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln on Grant: He makes things get. Wherever he is, he makes things move.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

~ Abraham Lincoln

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

~ Abraham Lincoln

If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.

~ Abraham Lincoln

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

~ Abraham Lincoln

My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

~ Abraham Lincoln

If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

~ Abraham Lincoln

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature - opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

~ Abraham Lincoln

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

~ Abraham Lincoln

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles - the oppression of tyranny - to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Repeal the Missouri Compromise - repeal all compromises - repeal the Declaration of Independence - repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man's heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

~ Abraham Lincoln

These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have.

~ Abraham Lincoln

My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana, in my eighth year... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up... Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher... but that was all.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

~ Abraham Lincoln

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

~ Abraham Lincoln

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

~ Abraham Lincoln