Abraham Lincoln Quotes

President of the United States from 1861 to 1865

Abraham Lincoln (12 February 1809 – 15 April 1865) was the 16th president of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Initially entering politics as a Whig, he became a member of the US congress from Illinois, and later the first Republican president, leading Union forces throughout the moral, constitutional, political and military crises of the American Civil War, during which he abolished slavery and strengthened the U.S. government.

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Alternative Names: Honest Abe • President Lincoln • Abe Lincoln • Uncle Abe • A. Lincoln • Lincoln

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From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.

Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.

Fourscore 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.

I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.

No matter how much the cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.

The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.

The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

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.