“What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.
―
Abraham Lincoln
“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)”
―
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
“Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to
converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I have destroyed my enemies when I make friends with them”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Women are the only people I am afraid of who I never thought would hurt me”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“A drop of honey gathers more flies than a gallon of gall.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Such will be a great lesson of peace: teaching men that what they cannot take by and election, neither can they take by war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.”
―
Abraham Lincoln