“If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.”

“The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until the egg is laid.”

“My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.”

“A nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure.”

“It is not in our forming battlements or bristling seacoasts, or our Army and Navy that makes America great - but rather our reliance in the law of liberty and the religious law God has planted in us.”

“There can be glory in failure and despair in success.”

“I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.”

“It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.”

“When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on”

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

“You can complain because a rose has thorns, or you can rejoice Because the thorns have a rose.”

“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth”

“What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?”

“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.” 

“Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other”