The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meannesses for the public good.
While the people retain their virtue and vigilence no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away it is best to let him run.
If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on
And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
No man is poor who has a Godly mother.
This struggle and scramble for office for a way to live without work will finally test the strength of our institutions.
There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many men: You work and earn bread and we will eat it.
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.
The struggle of today, is not altogether for today - it is for a vast future also.
Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your ow...
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it b...
Lincoln on Grant: "He makes things get. Wherever he is, he makes things move.