“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
“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.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Well, I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals. ”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Teach the children so it won't be necessary to teach the adults.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Nothing in this world is impossible to a willing heart.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I do the very best I can, I mean to keep going. If the end brings me out all right, then what is said against me won't matter. If I'm wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won't make a difference.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“. . . 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”
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Abraham Lincoln
“You can complain because a rose has thorns, or you can rejoice
Because the thorns have a rose.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“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
“No matter how much the cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens. ”
―
Abraham Lincoln
