“God must have loved the plain people; He made so many of them.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.”
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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
“Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." I am loath to close. 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 battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, 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
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”
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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
“Stand with anyone that is right; stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?”
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Abraham Lincoln
“A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded cannot be safely disregarded.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on”
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Abraham Lincoln
