“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.”

“Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”

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

“I am a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down...”

“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. --February 22, 1861”

“I am not concerned that you have fallen -- I am concerned that you arise.”

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 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. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” 

“Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”

“The loss of enemies does not compensate for the loss of friends.”

“Gold is good in it's place, but living, brave, patriotic men are better than gold.”

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power. … But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. (“A National Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer.” Proclamation March 30, 1863)”

“You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.”

“If Abraham Lincoln were alive now, he'd roll over in his grave.”

“I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody.”

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