Top 100 Abraham Lincoln Quotes
#2. The path was worn and slippery. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other out of the way, but I recovered and said to myself, "It's a slip and not a fall.
Abraham Lincoln
#3. As a general rule, I abstain from reading reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I cannot properly offer an answer.
Abraham Lincoln
#4. Faith is not believing that God can, but that God will.
Abraham Lincoln
#5. The president is the cube of ice one places in the pot of a houseplant, providing a steady amount of nourishment over the course of a hot day. A good description of the job and also a fantastic bit of practical household advice.
Abraham Lincoln
#6. I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the negroes ... I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
#7. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.
Abraham Lincoln
#8. I wish to see, in process of disappearing, that only thing which ever could bring this nation to civil war.
Abraham Lincoln
#10. As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
Abraham Lincoln
#11. I do not mean to say that this general government is charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world; but I do think that it is charged with the duty of preventing and redressing all wrongs which are wrongs to itself.
Abraham Lincoln
#12. Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.
Abraham Lincoln
#14. Those who are ready to sacrifice freedom for security ultimately will lose both.
Abraham Lincoln
#15. And upon this act [Emancipation Proclamation] ... I invoke ... the gracious favor of Almighty God.
Abraham Lincoln
#16. I am growing old enough not to care much for the MANNER of doing things.
Abraham Lincoln
#17. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.
Abraham Lincoln
#18. Now, and ever, I shall do all in my power for peace, consistently with the maintenance of government.
Abraham Lincoln
#19. We can succeed only by concert. It is not, 'Can any of us imagine better,' but, 'Can we all do better?'
Abraham Lincoln
#20. As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing, soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and next no one left to borrow from - so must it be with a government.
Abraham Lincoln
#21. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
February 22, 1861
Abraham Lincoln
#22. The severest justice may not always be the best policy
Abraham Lincoln
#23. I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me.
Abraham Lincoln
#24. You have confidence in yourself, which is valuable, if not an indispensable quality.
Abraham Lincoln
#25. You must think I am a high-priced man ... Fifteen dollars is enough for the job. I send you a receipt for fifteen dollars, and return to you a ten-dollar bill.
Abraham Lincoln
#26. Persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should be adopted to influence the conduct of men. The opposite course would be a reversal of human nature, which is God's decree and can never be reversed.
Abraham Lincoln
#27. I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has.
Abraham Lincoln
#28. While we are grateful to all the brave men and officers for the events of the past few days, we should, above all, be very grateful to Almighty God, who gives us victory.
Abraham Lincoln
#29. Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.
Abraham Lincoln
#30. I have stepped out upon this platform that I may see you and that you may see me, and in the arrangement I have the best of the bargain.
Abraham Lincoln
#31. We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, look for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
Abraham Lincoln
#32. I failed, I failed, and that is about all that can be said about it.
Abraham Lincoln
#33. If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creature.
Abraham Lincoln
#36. It is bad to be poor. I shall go to the wall for bread and meat, if I neglect my business this year as well as last.
Abraham Lincoln
#37. 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.
Abraham Lincoln
#38. It may be affirmed, without extravagance, that the free institutions we enjoy, have developed the powers, and improved the condition, of our whole people, beyond any example in the world.
Abraham Lincoln
#39. Cortissoz was art critic of the New York Herald Tribune.
Abraham Lincoln
#40. I have destroyed my enemies when I make friends with them
Abraham Lincoln
#41. Some single mind must be master, else there will be no agreement in anything.
Abraham Lincoln
#42. Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica.
Abraham Lincoln
#43. People without any vices rarely have any virtues either.
Abraham Lincoln
#44. We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it. Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known.
Abraham Lincoln
#45. I shall adopt new Muse as fast as they appear to be true Muse.
Abraham Lincoln
#47. Four score and seven days is too long between massages
Abraham Lincoln
#48. Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.
Abraham Lincoln
#49. All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.
Abraham Lincoln
#50. I am absent altogether too much to be a suitable instructor for a law-student. When a man has reached the age that Mr. Widner has,and has already been doing for himself, my judgment is, that he reads the books for himself without an instructor. That is precisely the way I came to the law.
Abraham Lincoln
#51. If frienship is your weakest point then you are the strongest person in the world.
Abraham Lincoln
#52. 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
#53. There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'
Abraham Lincoln
#54. Cling to liberty and right; battle fro them; leed for them; die for them, if need be; and have confidence in God.
Abraham Lincoln
#56. Don't worry when you are not recognized but strive to be worthy of recognition
Abraham Lincoln
#57. When met with a problem I always ask myself what is the right thing to do and then I do it.
Abraham Lincoln
#58. We shall yet acknowledge His wisdom and our own error therein.
Abraham Lincoln
#59. Singular indeed the people should be writhing under oppression and injury, and yet not one among them to be found, to raise the voice of complaint.
Abraham Lincoln
#60. Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damages morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hung
Abraham Lincoln
#63. Any society that takes away from those most capable and gives to the least will perish.
Abraham Lincoln
#65. Hypocrite: The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.
Abraham Lincoln
#67. I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men's rights.
Abraham Lincoln
#68. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.
Abraham Lincoln
#69. I am greatly obliged to you, and to all who have come forward at the call of their country.
Abraham Lincoln
#70. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
- President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address, November 19, 1863
Abraham Lincoln
#71. The best time to stop a fight is before it starts.
The best vitamin for developing friends is B1.
The best way to destroy an enemy in to make him a friend.
Abraham Lincoln
#72. Peace is a thing which a person must be willing to fight for ...
Abraham Lincoln
#73. What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle - the sheet anchor of American republicanism.
Abraham Lincoln
#75. There is something so ludicrous in promises of good or threats of evil a great way off as to render the whole subject with which they are connected easily turned into ridicule.
Abraham Lincoln
#76. Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.
Abraham Lincoln
#77. Reputation is like fine china: Once broken it's very hard to repair.
Abraham Lincoln
#78. The unpleasant events you are passing from will not have been profitless to you.
Abraham Lincoln
#79. Why don't I drink from a straw? Because straws are for suckers.
Abraham Lincoln
#80. The world is agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied. There is no dispute upon this point.
Abraham Lincoln
#81. To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, ["] and to preach there-from that, "In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread," to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.
Abraham Lincoln
#82. The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.
Abraham Lincoln
#83. Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in bonds of fraternal feeling.
Abraham Lincoln
#84. I see a very dark cloud on America's horizon, and that cloud is coming from Rome.
Abraham Lincoln
#85. Do you think we choose the times into which we are born? Or do we fit the times we are born into?
Abraham Lincoln
#86. Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don't [sic] want to go to Congress, I wish you as a personal friend of mine, wouldtell him that you have reason to believe he is mistaken.
Abraham Lincoln
#87. I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No - when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
Abraham Lincoln
#88. The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.
Abraham Lincoln
#91. I could write shorter sermons but when I get started I'm too lazy to stop
Abraham Lincoln
#93. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as
naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them.
Abraham Lincoln
#94. I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Abraham Lincoln
#95. The blessing always comes back to the door of the author.
Abraham Lincoln
#96. The only assurance of our nation's safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion.
Abraham Lincoln
#97. A statesman is he who thinks in the future generations, and a politician is he who thinks in the upcoming elections.
Abraham Lincoln
#98. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was not made to conceal or destroy the apple, but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple-not the apple for the picture.
Abraham Lincoln
#99. And then, the negro being doomed, and damned, and forgotten, to everlasting bondage, is the white man quite certain that the tyrant demon will not turn upon him too?
Abraham Lincoln
#100. You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry
Abraham Lincoln
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