Abraham Lincoln Quotes (426 Quotes)


    I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed but I am bound to live the best life that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right and part from him when he goes wrong.

    You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm.


    I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter for that I have determined for myself. Attributed to President Abraham Lincoln. Salmon P. Chase, diary entry for September 22, 1862, Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P Chase, p. 88 (1903, reprinted 1971). According to the Chase account, Lincoln spoke these words at a cabinet meeting he had called to inform the members of his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. This quotation is also used in Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln The War Years, p. 584 (1939). Although these words are not used, the same thought is conveyed in the diary of another member of Lincoln's cabinet, Gideon Welles. See his diary entry for the same date in Diary of Gideon Welles, vol. 1, pp. 142-43 (1911).

    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.


    Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed.

    Stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.

    Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.


    No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained

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


    Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.

    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.

    I do not think much of a man who does not know more today than he did yesterday.

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

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

    Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men

    Let me not be understood as saying that there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be religiously observed.

    Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in bonds of fraternal feeling.

    He who does something at the head of one regiment, will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred.

    I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.

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

    I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our Nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced. . . . Immigration, which even the war has not stopped, will land upon our shores hundred of thousands more per year from overcrowded Europe. I intend to point them to the gold and silver that waits for them in the West. Toll the miners from me, that I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my ability because their prosperity is the prosperity of the Nation, and we shall prove in a very few years that we are indeed the treasury of the world. Message for the miners of the West, delivered verbally to Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, who was about to depart on a trip to the West, in the afternoon of April 14, 1865, before Lincoln left for Ford's Theatre. Colfax delivered the message to a large crowd of citizens in Denver, Colorado, May 27, 1865. - Edward Winslow Martin, The Life and Public Services of Schuyler Colfax, pp. 187-88 (1868).

    The true rule in determining to embrace or reject anything is not whether it have any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil than of good. There are few things wholly evil or wholly good.

    A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe fruit at length falls into his lap.

    If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on

    I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races - I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office,

    It is better only sometimes to be right than at all times wrong

    Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

    In times like these men should utter nothing for which they would not be willingly responsible through time and in eternity.


    What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumpt.


    Upon the North gaining control of the Mississippi River The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.

    With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.


    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 chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

    Remarks at Closing of Sanitary Fair, Washington D.C., March 18, 1864. I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, God bless the women of America.


    Whether or not the world would be vastly benefited by a total banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks seems not now an open question. Three-fourths of mankind confess the affirmative with their tongues, and I believe all the rest acknowledge it in their hearts.

    The question recurs 'how shall we fortify against it' The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

    No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.


    No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

    As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

    No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

    I can make a General in five minutes but a good horse is hard to replace.

    For people who like that kind of a book that is the kind of book they will like

    What has once happened, will invariably happen again, when the same circumstances which combined to produce it, shall again combine in the same way.


    Related Authors


    Theodore Roosevelt - John F. Kennedy - Franklin D. Roosevelt - Lyndon B. Johnson - James A. Garfield - Herbert Hoover - Gerald R. Ford - Dwight D. Eisenhower - Andrew Johnson - Andrew Jackson


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