But for this book we could not know right from wrong.
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
The loss of enemies does not compensate for the loss of friends.
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.
I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.
All I have learned, I learned from books.
You can’t make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak.
We trust, sir, that God is on our side. It is more important to know that we are on God’s side.
I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.
I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not.
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.
No state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.
If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already.
Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought.
All that harms labor is treason to America.
I am busily engaged in the study of the Bible. I believe it is God’s word because it finds me where I am.
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.
To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.
Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionall y decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.