The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason He makes so many of them.
He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
I leave it to my audience — if I had another face to wear, do you think I would wear this one? [Lincoln had been called a “two-faced man” by Douglas]
As for being President, I feel like the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. To the man who asked him how he liked it, he said, “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”
Bad promises are better broken than kept.
Reports are often false, and always false when made by a knave to cloak his knavery.
History is not history unless it is the Truth.
It is better only sometimes to be right, than at all times to be wrong.
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.
The true rule, in determining to embrace or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil than of good. There are few things wholly evil or wholly good.
I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind … I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.
It has been said of the world’s history hitherto that might makes right. It is for us and for out time to reverse the maxim, and to say that right makes might.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature — opposition to it in his love of justice.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names — liberty and tyranny.