Quotes from Abraham Lincoln

If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

The Bible is not my book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.

Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.

Seriously, I do not think I am fit for the Presidency.

Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.

A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.

Anybody will do for you, but not for me.

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

Lincoln on Grant: "He makes things get. Wherever he is, he makes things move.

If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.

All I have learned, I learned from books.

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Hypocrite: The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

If there should prove to be one real, living Free State Democrat in Kansas, I suggest that it might be well to catch him and stuff and preserve his skin as an interesting specimen of that soon-to-be-extinct variety of the genus Democrat.

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

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.

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

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.