“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
“Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything.
If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Such will be a great lesson of peace: teaching men that what they cannot take by and election, neither can they take by war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Don't give up. Come on. Just keep on trying. Don't frown. Smile! You can do it. If you just try a little harder. I've got a feeling this whole thing might just work out okay. You'll see. Don't give up. Tomorrow is a brand new day. Now I want to see all of you get up on your feet and look like you're enjoying yourselves. Come on, let's see some of that famous ‘Pennsylvania optimism’ I've heard so much about..." [Excerpted from the recently discovered preamble to Gettysburg Address]”
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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 wll ever to struggle.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“One company can serve some of your needs all of the time, or all of your needs some of the time, but never both.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
