Abraham Lincoln
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 exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.Collection: Government
Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false... In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.Collection: Truth
If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.Collection: Funny
The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with their institution in the states, I have constantly denied.Collection: Legal
I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.Collection: Religion
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
Never regret what you don't write.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Everybody likes a compliment.
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.
The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every calling, is diligence.
All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap - let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.
I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end... I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.
Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.
Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.
I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.
With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.
Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil and in the proportionable amount of the same which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.
If the people of Utah shall peacefully form a State Constitution tolerating polygamy, will the Democracy admit them into the Union?
As our case is new, we must think and act anew.
I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right; but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation may be on the Lord's side.
Don't swap horses in crossing a stream.
Standing as I do, with my hand upon this staff, and under the folds of the American flag, I ask you to stand by me so long as I stand by it.
Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this.
I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.
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.
I think that slavery is wrong, morally, socially and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.
I hold that while man exists, it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind.
When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism.
It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.
There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.
Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder.
I am rather inclined to silence.
Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.
By what principle of original right is it that one-fiftieth or one-ninetieth of a great nation, by calling themselves a State, have the right to break up and ruin that nation as a matter of original principle?
Some day I shall be President.
We can succeed only by concert. It is not, 'Can any of us imagine better,' but, 'Can we all do better?'
In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
I understand a ship to be made for the carrying and preservation of the cargo, and so long as the ship can be saved, with the cargo, it should never be abandoned. This Union likewise should never be abandoned unless it fails and the possibility of its preservation shall cease to exist, without throwing passengers and cargo overboard.
No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.
Knavery and flattery are blood relations.
I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.
Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.
It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.