Popular Quotes Through Time

I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way.

Is he [youth] not the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future?

The inclination to exchange thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature.

Writing ... is the great invention of the world.

Stand by your principles; stand by your guns; and victory complete and permanent is sure at the last.

I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency.

Of course I would have preferred success; but failing in that, I have no regrets for having rejected all advice to the contrary, and resolutely made the struggle.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Every head should be cultivated.

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

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.

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