“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.” 

“If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.”

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

“Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.”

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

“The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”

“I will study and prepare myself, and someday my chance will come.”

“The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day.”

“Let [the Constitution] be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges, let it be written in primers, in spelling books and in almanacs, let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.”

“In your temporary failure there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.”

“The struggle of today, is not altogether for today - it is for a vast future also.”

“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.”

“Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.”

“Laughter can be used to sooth the mind and get rid of those awful thoughts.”