Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln
If this is coffee, please bring me some tea;
but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
- Abraham Lincoln
I care not much for a man's religion
whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
- Abraham Lincoln
The Lord prefers common-looking people.
That is why he makes so many of them.
- Abraham Lincoln
Marriage is neither heaven nor hell,
it is simply purgatory.
- Abraham Lincoln
No matter how much cats fight,
there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
- Abraham Lincoln
Avoid popularity if you would have peace.
- Abraham Lincoln
How many legs does a dog have
if you call the tail a leg? Four.
Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
- Abraham Lincoln
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
- Abraham Lincoln
I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
- Abraham Lincoln
These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert,
to fleece the people.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
Hold on with a bulldog grip,
and chew and choke as much as possible.
- Abraham Lincoln
Common looking people are the best in the world:
that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.
- Abraham Lincoln
Am I not destroying my enemies
when I make friends of them?
- Abraham Lincoln
God must love the common man, he made so many of them.
- Abraham Lincoln
When I hear a man preach,
I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
- Abraham Lincoln
Things may come to those who wait,
but only the things left by those who hustle.
- Abraham Lincoln
The best thing about the future is
that it comes one day at a time.
- Abraham Lincoln
Books serve to show a man
that those original thoughts of his
aren't very new at all.
- Abraham Lincoln
Never stir up litigation.
A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this.
- Abraham Lincoln
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs
and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
It has been my experience that folks who
have no vices, have very few virtues.
- Abraham Lincoln
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
- Abraham Lincoln
Every one desires to live long,
but no one would be old.
- Abraham Lincoln
Knavery and flattery are blood relations.
- Abraham Lincoln
No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.
- Anonymous (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)
I don't like that man.
I must get to know him better.
- Abraham Lincoln
The philosophy of the school room in one generation
will be the philosophy of government in the next.
- Abraham Lincoln
In great contests, each party claims to act
in accordance with the will of God.
Both may be, and one must be wrong.
- Abraham Lincoln
I have always found that mercy bears
richer fruits than strict justice.
- Abraham Lincoln
Republicans are for both the man and the dollar,
but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.
- Abraham Lincoln
Let's have faith that right makes might;
and in that faith let us, to the end,
dare to do our duty as we understand it.
- Abraham Lincoln
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
- Abraham Lincoln
My dream is of a place and a time where America
will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.
- Abraham Lincoln
I was losing interest in politics,
when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.
What I have done since then is pretty well known.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me.
They have clung to me all my life.
- Abraham Lincoln
Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
- Abraham Lincoln
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 nation's wounds.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
With the fearful strain that is on me night and day,
if I did not laugh I should die.
- Abraham Lincoln
You can have anything you want -
if you want it badly enough.
You can be anything you want to be,
do anything you set out to accomplish
if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.
- Abraham Lincoln
A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed
is more important than any other one thing.
- Abraham Lincoln
Don't worry when you are not recognized,
but strive to be worthy of recognition.
- Abraham Lincoln
Everybody likes a compliment.
- Abraham Lincoln
Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.
- Abraham Lincoln
Government of the people,
by the people,
for the people,
shall not perish from this Earth.
- Abraham Lincoln
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.
- Abraham Lincoln
Public sentiment is everything.
With public sentiment, nothing can fail.
Without it, nothing can succeed.
- Abraham Lincoln
If there is anything that a man can do well,
I say let him do it. Give him a chance.
- Abraham Lincoln
Towering genius disdains a beaten path.
It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
- Abraham Lincoln
The people themselves, and not their servants,
can safely reverse their own deliberate decisions.
- Abraham Lincoln
I'm a slow walker, but I never walk backward.
- Abraham Lincoln
He who molds the public sentiment...
makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.
- Abraham Lincoln
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat,
for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator,
while the wolf denounces him for the same act
as the destroyer of liberty,
especially as the sheep was a black one.
Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed
upon a definition of the word liberty;
and precisely the same difference
prevails today among us human creatures
- Abraham Lincoln
Fourscore and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation, conceived in Liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
- Abraham Lincoln
Give me six hours to chop down a tree
and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
- Abraham Lincoln
Those who deny freedom to others
deserve it not for themselves.
- Abraham Lincoln
I desire so to conduct the affairs
of this administration that, if at the end...
I have lost every other friend on earth,
I shall at least have one friend left,
and that friend shall be down inside of me.
- Abraham Lincoln
No man is good enough to govern another man
without that other's consent.
- Abraham Lincoln
You have to do your own growing
no matter how tall your grandfather was.
- Abraham Lincoln
He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.
- Abraham Lincoln
There is nothing true anywhere,
The true is nowhere to be seen;
If you say you see the true,
This seeing is not the true one.
- Abraham Lincoln paraphrasing Lao Tzu' Tao te Ching
What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.
- Abraham Lincoln
All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.
- Abraham Lincoln
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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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