Quotes By Abraham Lincoln

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

Persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.

My father, at the Death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up literally without education.

With pleasure I write my name in your Album. Ere long some younger man will be more happy to confer his name upon you. Don't allow it, Mary, until fully assured that he is worthy of the happiness.

I have enlisted for the permanent success of the Republican cause; and, for this object, I shall labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position.

What brought these Democrats with us? The Slavery issue. Drop that issue and they have no motive to remain, and will not remain with us. It is idiotic to think otherwise.

We must have though a man who recognizes the slavery issue as being the living issue of the day; who does not hesitate to declare slavery a wrong, nor to deal with it as such; who believes in the power and duty of Congress to prevent the spread of it.

Ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.

Heads are regarded as explosive materials, only to be safely kept in damp places, as far as possible from the peculiar sort of fire which ignites them.

No other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought, as agriculture.

Every head should be cultivated.

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems.

Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

Twenty-five years ago, I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account today; and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement - improvement in conditions - is the order of things in a society of equals.

The power of hope upon human exertion, and happiness, is wonderful.

I hold if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, he would have made them with mouths only and no hands.

I have found that when one is embarrassed, usually the shortest way to get through with it is to quit talking or thinking about it, and go at something else.

No party can command respect which sustains this year, what it opposed last.

Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.

I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.