Quotes from Abraham Lincoln

While the people retain their virtue and vigilence, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

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. This is a most valuable and sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.

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. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Do not worry; eat three square meals a day; say your prayers; be courteous to your creditors; keep your digestion good; exercise; go slow and easy. Maybe there are other things your special case requires to make you happy; but, my friend, these I reckon will give you a good lift.

Most folk are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

The point - the power to hurt - of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.

There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.

Let the people know the truth and the country is safe.

The solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

You dislike the emancipation proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional - I think differently.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

I cannot make it better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization.

I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.

the better angels of our nature

A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.

I don't s'pose anybody on earth likes gingerbread better'n I do-and gets less'n I do.

As a nation we began by declaring that all me are created equal. We now practically read it, all men are created equal except Negroes.

With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.