Quotes by Abraham Lincoln

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It is the eternal struggle between two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world... It is the same spirit that says "You toil and work and earn bread--and I'll eat it." No matter what in shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle!
--Abraham Lincoln

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

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away."
--Abraham Lincoln

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
--Abraham Lincoln

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

Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.
--Abraham Lincoln

Military glory--the attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood.
--Abraham Lincoln

It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.
--Abraham Lincoln

We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.
--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.
--Abraham Lincoln

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

All honor to Jefferson -- to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
--Abraham Lincoln

Thers is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.
--Abraham Lincoln

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.
--Abraham Lincoln

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.
--Abraham Lincoln

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
--Abraham Lincoln

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
--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 purposeand you allow him to make war at pleasure.
--Abraham Lincoln

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.
--Abraham Lincoln

[The Democrats can] nominate a Peace Democrat on a War Platform or a War Democrat on a Peace Platform and I personally can't say that I much care which they do.
--Abraham Lincoln

For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.
--Abraham Lincoln

Military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy...
--Abraham Lincoln

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

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
--Abraham Lincoln

The better part of one's life consists of friendship.
--Abraham Lincoln