“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
“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but holding it a sound maxim, that it is better to be only sometimes right, than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I am a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down...”
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Abraham Lincoln
“You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Stand with anyone that is right; stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“A tendancy to melancholy...let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
