“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
“One company can serve some of your needs all of the time, or all of your needs some of the time, but never both.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The worst thing you can do for those you love is the things they could and should do themselves.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. --February 22, 1861”
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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.”
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Abraham Lincoln
