Quotes from Abraham Lincoln

The more sects we have the better. They are all getting somebody in (to the Church) that the others could not: and even with the numerous divisions we are all doing tolerably well.

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically re-signed their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Once said that his political adversary "dived down deeper into the sea of knowledge and came up drier than any other man he knew.

All I can do is the best I can do. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged....

He is not my equal in many respects, but in his right to enjoy 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' in his right to put into his mouth the bread that his hands have earned, he is my equal...

Lincoln characterized Stephen Douglas's argument as a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

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

Towering genius...thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.

We cannot escape history.

let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty.