Famous Quotes By Abraham Lincoln

 

1. All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.
2. All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.
3. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.
4. Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
5. Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe,
6. Avoid popularity if you would have peace.
7. Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.
8. Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.
9. Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.
10. Fourscore 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.
11. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.
12. I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
13. I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
14. I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
15. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.
16. I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.
17. I never had a policy I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.
18. I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.
19. I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.
20. I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.
21. If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.
22. If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.
23. If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.
24. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.
25. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.
26. In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
27. It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
28. It is rather for us 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.
29. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
30. Lets have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
31. Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.
32. Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
33. My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.
34. My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
35. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
36. No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
37. No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.
38. No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
39. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
40. Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.
41. Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.
42. That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.
43. The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.
44. The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.
45. The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.
46. The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.
47. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
48. The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
49. The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.
50. The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
51. 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.
52. The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.
53. There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'
54. These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have.
55. This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
56. To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
57. We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
58. Whatever you are, be a good one.
59. When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
60. When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.
61. When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
62. With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.
63. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.