Quotes by Abraham Lincoln

The things I want to know are in books my best friend is the man wholl get me a book I aint read.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.

Gold is good in its place; but loving, brave, patriotic men are better than gold.

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.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with their institution in the states, I have constantly denied.

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

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, is to liberate the world.

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

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.

“Im a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didnt have the heart to let him down.”

“That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.”

“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.”

“I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.”

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.”

“this too shall pass”

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”

“Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)”