“You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence”
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Abraham Lincoln
“No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded cannot be safely disregarded.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.”
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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“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”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
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I laugh because I must not cry, that is all, that is all. ”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“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
“Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“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.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”
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Abraham Lincoln
