Quotes by Abraham Lincoln

I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end ... I have lost every friend on earth I shall have one friend left and that friend shall be down inside me.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

Lincoln on Grant: He makes things get. Wherever he is, he makes things move.

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.

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyers avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

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.

If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the countrys cause.

I have great respect for the semicolon it is a mighty handy little fellow.

If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of mans nature - opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

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 nations wounds.

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.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles - the oppression of tyranny - to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise - repeal all compromises - repeal the Declaration of Independence - repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of mans heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.