“If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.”

“In your temporary failure there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.”

“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 am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

“I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him. ”

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

“You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.”

“I laugh because I must not cry, that is all, that is all. ”

“The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.”

“I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.”

“Force is all conquering, but it's victories are short lived.”

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

“Earth without ART is just EH”  “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

“I do the very best I can, I mean to keep going. If the end brings me out all right, then what is said against me won't matter. If I'm wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won't make a difference.”

“I never tire of reading