“I'm a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down.”

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

“Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

“Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.”

“If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool.”

“If my father's son can become President of these United States, then your father's son can become anything he wishes.”

“Avoid popularity if you would have peace”

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, 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.” 

“I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”

“Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.”

“The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he made so many of them.”

“Don't worry when you are not recognized but strive to be worthy of recognition”

“And I like a mouse who has taken a cat for its tutor.”