Quotes About Abraham Lincoln

The trust that Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? —Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

Six days later, the president named a postmaster for New Salem, Illinois, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had lost a race for the state legislature. He was a Clay man, but the post was hardly major, and Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept the appointment.

Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and part of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; . . . And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

Can you inform me, gentlemen, where General Grant procures his whisky? . . . Because if I can find out, I'll send a barrel of it to every General in the field!

That [man] can compress the most words in the fewest ideas of any man I ever knew.

I have just read your dispatch about sore tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?

Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time.

In other fields of endeavor poverty has been the spur to action. Napoleon was born in obscurity, the son of a hand-to-mouth scrivener in the backward island of Corsica. Abraham Lincoln, the boast and pride of America, the man who made this land too hot for the feet of slaves, came from a log cabin in the Ohio backwoods. So did James A. Garfield. Ulysses Grant came from a tanyard to become the world's greatest general. Thomas A. Edison commenced as a newsboy on a railway train.

Abraham Lincoln wasn't much of a dancer. Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you in the worst way, he told his future wife. Miss Todd later said to a friend, He certainly did. John Quincy Adams was a first-rate swimmer. Once when he was skinny-dipping in the Potomac River, a women reporter snatched his clothes and sat on them until he gave her an interview.

He [President Abraham Lincoln] has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.

I've been pinching our pennies so tightly that Abraham Lincoln's face is imprinted on my fingers.

If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore "the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.

There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.

On July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of his cabinet to reveal—not to debate—his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail," Abraham Lincoln said, "without it nothing can succeed.

Abraham Lincoln never lived to see the completion of the task he had begun with his Proclamation—the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by three-quarters of the states in December 1865.

To answer those who asked if Lincoln would reconsider, Douglass gave an emphatic no. "Abraham Lincoln will take no step backward," he insisted. "If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.

Abraham Lincoln, cleaving to the Constitution, had stipulated that the preservation of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, was the issue of this war, and Congress formally backed him in asserting just that with the Crittenden Resolution.

Somebody pitched me a superhero movie involving Abraham Lincoln. I was also pitched the idea of Dwarfula, which involved a mob of little people.

How many honest men do you know? Take the sinners away from the saints, you're lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln.

But, slavery is good for some people! ! ! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.