“Important principles may and must be inflexible.”

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”

“The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.”

“Investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

“A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded cannot be safely disregarded.”

“In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time.”

“What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”

“The most altruistic man is the most selfish.”

“Gold is good in it's place, but living, brave, patriotic men are better than gold.”

“There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”

“I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.”

“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

“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.” 

“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.”