“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“If friendship is your weakest point, then you are the strongest person in the world.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. -Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power. … But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. (“A National Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer.” Proclamation March 30, 1863)”
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Abraham Lincoln
“No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar”
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Abraham Lincoln
“you can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors”
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Abraham Lincoln
“If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“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.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away. it's best to let him run"
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Abraham Lincoln
