Abraham Lincoln
“A jury too often has at least one member who is more ready to hang the panel than the traitor.”
“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
“Character is like a tree and reputation is like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”
“Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.”
“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.” [in his Nov. 19, 1863 Gettysburg Address]
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
“God must love the common man, he made so many of them.”
“He can compress the worst words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.”
“He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then, when the sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.”
“I can make a General in five minutes but a good horse is hard to replace.”
“I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
“I do the very best I know how, the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end.”
“I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.”
“I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.”
“I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.” [In a letter to Mrs. O. H. Browning, April 1, 1838]
“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”
“If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.”
“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the great high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause.”
“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.” [in his Dec. 1, 1862 annual address to Congress]
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
“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.”
“Military glory—the attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood.”
“My father taught me to work, but not to love it. I never did like to work, and I don't deny it. I'd rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh--anything but work.”
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.”
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”
“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”
“No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.”
“Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.”
“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
“Property is the fruit of labor: property is desirable; it is a positive good.”
“Public opinion in this country is everything.”
“Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”
“Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my great concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.”
“Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man’s nature--opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.”
“Surely God would not have created such a being as man... to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.”
“Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”
“That on the 1st day of January, in the year of our Lord 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” [Emancipation Proclamation, issued on Jan. 1, 1863]
“The best things about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.”
“The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even a hundred defeats.” [in a Nov. 19, 1958 letter to Henry Asbury]
“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all in their separate and individual capacities.”
“The Lord prefers common looking people. That is why he made so many of them.”
“The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a course we believe to be just.”
“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.”
“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.”
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”
“To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.”
“We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.”
“We must ask where we are and whither we are tending.”
"What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself."
“Whatever you are, be a good one.”
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
“Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people?”
“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, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”