“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 battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone 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
“Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”
―
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.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Anything can be a bucket if you try hard enough and believe.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“A tendancy to melancholy...let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“no man who is resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention, still less can he afford to take the consequences, including the vitiation of his temper and the loss of self control, yield to larger things to which you show no more than equal rights, and yield to lesser ones though clearly your own, better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right, not even killing the dog, will cure the bite”
―
Abraham Lincoln
