Quotes from Abraham Lincoln

God must have loved the plain people: He made so many of them.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.

Every man over forty is responsible for his face.

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meannesses for the public good.

Important principles may and must be flexible.

When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it is best to let him run.

I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is, but it does not admit of holidays.

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 their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Let us have faith that Right makes Might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing.

With high hope for the future, no prediction is ventured.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

I feel like the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. To the man who asked how he liked it he said: 'If it wasn't for the honour of the thing, I'd rather walk.'

I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if, at the end ... I have lost every friend on earth, I shall have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.

I know the hole he went in at, but I can't tell you what hole he will come out of.

Sending armies to McClellan is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard, not half of them get there.

War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object

If all do not join now to save the good old ship of the Union this voyage nobody will have a chance to pilot her on another voyage.