Famous Quotes

Quotes by Abraham Lincoln

• All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.
• All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.
• 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 a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
• Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.
• Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
• 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 that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
• At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
• Avoid popularity if you would have peace.
• Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.
• 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.
• Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.
• Fourscore 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.
• Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.
• I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
• I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
• I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
• I do the very best I know how - the very best I can and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.
• I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.
• I never had a policy I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.
• I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.
• I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.
• I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.
• 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.
• If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.
• If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.
• In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.
• In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.
• In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
• It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
• 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.
• 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.
• Lets have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
• Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.
• Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
• My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.