“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 will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until the egg is laid.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more; you can go home and try to bring the people to your views, and you may say anything you like about me, if that will help... When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”
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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
“We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I was a little cross.I ask pardon. If I do get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to keep it up.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular govenment is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the govenment whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
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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
