“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.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“you can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“The worst thing you can do for those you love is the things they could and should do themselves.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Women are the only people I am afraid of who I never thought would hurt me”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.
Dear Madam,--
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.
―
Abraham Lincoln
“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature, opposition to it in 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
