“They [the signers of the Declaration of Independence] did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right; so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“If Friendship is your weakest point, you are the strongest person in the world.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“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.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature, opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism, and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“you can't escape tomorrow's responsibilities by evading it today”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“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
