“Gentlemen, why do you not laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me day and night, if I did not laugh, I should die. ”

“You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence”

“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

“I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

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

“you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”

“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.” 

“You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.”

“No matter how much the cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens. ”

“What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?”

“I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.”

“I would just as soon die now, but I haven't done anything yet to be remembered by”

“All I have learned, I learned from books.”

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

“If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.”