“A tendancy to melancholy...let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.”

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

“You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.”

“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 up to what light I have.”

“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.”

“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

“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.” 

“Too big to cry too young to laugh...”

“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.”

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”

“Military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy...”

“You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

“If we magnified our successes as much as we magnify our disappointments, we'd all be much happier”

“No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.”

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”