Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) was the 16th president of the United States 1861–65 and one of the great American leaders. The American Civil War dominated his presidency.
Not much is known about the early life of Lincoln. He was born in a log cabin in Hodgenville, Kentucky. His family was poor, and Lincoln lost his mother at nine, completed just one year of traditional schooling, spent his youth in Indiana, and did manual labor until he was 21.
Lincoln pursued self-education by reading books on grammar and rhetoric and joined a debating society. At age 27, after years of private study of law, he obtained a license to practice and eventually became one of Illinois’s ablest lawyers. Lincoln also worked his way through the Illinois State Legislature and got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He gained popularity for his down-to-earth wit, integrity, and opposition to the institution of slavery.
Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War held the country together through the worst moral, constitutional, and political crisis in its history. On 9-April-1865, the Confederate general Robert E Lee surrendered and ending the war. It had lasted for more than four years, and 600,000 Americans had died. Six days later, Lincoln was shot while attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. and died the next morning. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a strong supporter of the Confederacy.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is celebrated for its reaffirmation of a founding principle of the United States: that all humans are born equal.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Abraham Lincoln
I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Self-improvement, Growth, Learning, Wisdom
The President to-night has a dream:He was in a party of plain people, and, as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said:He is a very common-looking man. The President replied:The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them.
—Abraham Lincoln
People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Enjoyment
We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Character
Has it popular sovereignty not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?
—Abraham Lincoln
I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If he has a place and work for meand I think He hasI believe I am ready.
—Abraham Lincoln
If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere. Squirming and crawling about from place to place can do no good.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Work
The best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Enemies, Enemy
Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.
—Abraham Lincoln
The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Friendship, Enemies
If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one and praised by the other.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Right
God must have loved the plain people: He made so many of them.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: People
Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Will Power, Will, Willpower
The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Mistakes, Failure, Failures, Justice
Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Tact
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Passion, Willpower, Determination, Dedication, Success, Mind, Desire, Commitment, Enthusiasm, Success & Failure
There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Peace, Honor
In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour. And inasmuch as most good things are produced by labour, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.
—Abraham Lincoln
I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights.
—Abraham Lincoln
In times like the present men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Responsibility
If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool.
—Abraham Lincoln
I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone.
—Abraham Lincoln
Every man over forty is responsible for his face.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Face, Integrity, Faces
I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.
—Abraham Lincoln
The land, the earth God gave to man for his home…should never be the possession of any man, corporation, (or) society…any more than the air or water.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Wilderness
He said that he felt like the boy that stumped his toe, it hurt too bad to laugh, and he was too big to cry.
—Abraham Lincoln
A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe fruit at length falls into his lap.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Life
Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Posterity, History
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.
—Abraham Lincoln
It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Values, God, Religion
When someone asked Abraham Lincoln, after he was elected president, what he was going to do about his enemies, he replied, “I am going to destroy them. I am going to make them my friends.”
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Government
Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Fighting, Quarrels, Fight
Any society that takes away from those most capable and gives to the least will perish.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Society
Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
—Abraham Lincoln
Senator Stephen Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices, landoffices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.
—Abraham Lincoln
I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our Nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced. Immigration, which even the war has not stopped, will land upon our shores hundred of thousands more per year from overcrowded Europe. I intend to point them to the gold and silver that waits for them in the West. Tell the miners from me, that I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my ability; because their prosperity is the prosperity of the Nation, and we shall prove in a very few years that we are indeed the treasury of the world.
—Abraham Lincoln
I am not concerned that you have fallen—I am concerned that you arise.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Perseverance, Persistence
Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the? work—who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even, hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then, to falter now?—now—when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise councils may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later the victory is sure to come.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Battle, Government
I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
—Abraham Lincoln
Topics: Friendship
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