“Believing everyone is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
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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
“These [the armed forces] are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where.... Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. 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.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The loss of enemies does not compensate for the loss of friends.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I am very little inclined on any occasion to say anything unless I hope to produce some good by it.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“If my father's son can become President of these United States, then your father's son can become anything he wishes.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“A drop of honey gathers more flies than a gallon of gall”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain it.”
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Abraham Lincoln