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

“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.”

“There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”

“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.” 

“When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away. it's best to let him run"

“On peut tromper une partie du peuple tout le temps et tout le peuple une partie du temps, mais on ne peut pas tromper tout le peuple tout le temps.”

“The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.”

“If you think you can you can, if you think you can't you're right!”

“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.”

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”

“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.”

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”

“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)”

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

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”