Quotes By Abraham Lincoln

All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself in every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

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.

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

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

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

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 a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

To give victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.

Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

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

I will prepare and some day my chance will come.

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

Everybody likes a compliment.

These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have.

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

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

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

The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.

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

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

He who molds the public sentiment... makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.