Quotes from Abraham Lincoln

People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.

Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.

Sir, My concern is not weather God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

That some should be rich, shows that others may become rich, and, hence, is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.

The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he makes so many of them.

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can excercise their constitutional right of amending it, or excercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.

Those who would deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in. That everyone may receive at least a moderate education appears to be an objective of vital importance.

We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory shall swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of nature.

We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it. Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known.

What is conservativism? Is it not the aherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?

What kills the skunk is the publicity it gives itself.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.

You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

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

My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.

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.

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.