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Abraham Lincoln Quotations

Abraham Lincoln Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois
Categories: Slavery
Date: January 27, 1838
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Abraham Lincoln Address at Cooper Institute
Categories: Slavery
Date: March 27, 1860
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Abraham Lincoln Annual Message to Congress
Categories: Virtue
Date: December 1, 1862
If there could ever be a time for mere catch arguments, that time is surely not now. In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not be personally responsible through time and eternity.
Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address
Categories: Declaration of Independence, Liberty
Date: November 19, 1863
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Abraham Lincoln First Inaugural
Categories: Government, Judiciary
Date: March 4, 1861
[I]f the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting, the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their Government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
Abraham Lincoln Lincoln- Douglass Debates Part I, Mr. Lincoln’s reply
Categories: Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Slavery
Date: September 15, 1858
[I]n the way our Fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction…All I have asked or desired anywhere, is that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the Fathers of our government originally placed it upon.
Abraham Lincoln Letter to Henry L. Pierce & others
Categories: Right of Revolution, The People, Truth, Tyranny
Date: April 6, 1859
[T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
Abraham Lincoln Lecture on Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements, before the Springfield Library Association, Springfield, Illinois
Categories: Patent, Property
Date: Unknown
Before [patent law], any man might instantly use what another had invented; the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.
Abraham Lincoln First Inaugural Address
Categories: The People
Date: March 4, 1861
I am loth 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, streching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living" heart and hearthstone, 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
Abraham Lincoln Union and the Constitution to Proverbs 25:11 “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver”
Categories: Constitution, Declaration of Independence
Date: January, 1861
The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it…The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.
Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address
Categories: God, Government, The People
Date: November 19, 1863
[W]e 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.
Abraham Lincoln The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum at Springfield, Illinois
Categories: Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Liberty
Date: January 27, 1838
As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor;--let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty.