“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what 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.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. --February 22, 1861”
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Abraham Lincoln
“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I was a little cross.I ask pardon. If I do get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to keep it up.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature, opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism, and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
