“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." I am loath to close. 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 battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, 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
“Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I have destroyed my enemies when I make friends with them”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“He whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers, has declared that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Gentlemen, why do you not laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me day and night, if I did not laugh, I should die. ”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many men: You work and earn bread and we will eat it.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.
―
Abraham Lincoln
“It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.”
―
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
“You can complain because a rose has thorns, or you can rejoice
Because the thorns have a rose.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
