Best Quotes from A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White Jr. with Page Numbers

A. Lincoln continues to fascinate us because he eludes simple definitions and final judgments.

When Lincoln spoke, audiences forgot his appearance as they listened to his inspiring words.

His integrity has many roots—in the soil, in Shakespeare, and in the Bible.

Every generation of Americans rightfully demands a new engagement with the past.

Lincoln was always comfortable with ambiguity.

He was the most … shut-mouthed man that ever existed.

Lincoln’s moral integrity is the strong trunk from which all the branches of his life grew.

Humor and tragedy, as portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays, are always close companions.

In doing battle with slavery, he was wrestling with the soul of America.

We must think anew, and act anew.

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

What he has in the way of education, he has picked up.

Even in childhood [he] was a wandering, laboring boy.

He was a man who took the world Easy—did not possess much Envy.

The truth, as always, is much more complex.

Life was difficult on the frontier, but letters to relatives on the Atlantic seaboard told stories of people choosing pioneering life.

Abraham Lincoln thought his family background was 'undistinguished.'

Many of the qualities that Abraham Lincoln would come to prize in his own life were present in the ancestry of his long, distinguished family.

He became a member of the Old Ship Church, which he helped build and which still stands today.

Settlers purchasing 'shingled' properties, lands that overlapped one another.

‘If pains and labor would get it he was sure to get it.’

‘What [he has] in the way of education, he has picked up.’

‘Abraham grew from a boy to a youth to a young man who would prove different from any young man in the world around him.’

‘He was large for his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.’

‘Each book that Lincoln read by the fire in Indiana became a log in the foundation of the schoolhouse of his mind.’

‘The books young Lincoln read tell us he was drawn to morality tales of the triumph of good over evil.’

‘A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.’

‘I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother—can say in a thousand and it is this—Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused … to do anything I requested him.’

‘What could be better than traveling with Shakespeare and Bunyan to England, with Robert Burns to Scotland, and Lord Byron to Italy?’

‘God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.’

I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.

How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.

I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.

My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon me.

I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.

Lincoln won something more important than a wrestling match that day. He proved his strength and his courage to himself and his new community.

My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance.

If elected I shall be thankful; if not it will be all the same.

His mind was full of terrible enquiry—and was skeptical in a good sense.

While acting as their representative, I shall be governed by their will, on all subjects.

If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon my constituents, as well those oppose, as those that support me.

I shall be governed by their will, on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is; and upon others, I shall do what my own judgment teaches me will best advance their interests.

It is now time TO ACT.

There was no danger of the new surveyor’s ousting the old one so long as he persisted not to die.

Lincoln believed that an elected politician held an office for only a brief time at best; the people were the permanent representatives in a republic.

He promised all his creditors that he would make good on his debt.

Lincoln began reading law books shortly after his arrival in New Salem.

Lincoln approached the study of law with the same single-minded discipline he had previously applied to the study of grammar, elocution, and surveying.

They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.

If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.

I have not the money to pay... If I fail in that I will probably never be able to pay you at all.

Mr. Lincoln was a social man, though he did not seek company; it sought him.

He [Lincoln] believed there was too much denunciation against the dram sellers and dram drinkers.

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

We must advance.

Many free countries have lost their liberty; and ours may lose hers.

The cause approved of our judgment, and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, torture, in death, WE NEVER faltered in defending.

The end of all our labor should not be to vex and torment with the spirit of our God.

Omnipotence condescended to take on himself the form of sinful man... surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their own fellow creatures.

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.

I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women.

If it suits you best to not answer this—farewell —a long life and a merry one attend you.

Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented.

The effect upon Mr. Lincoln’s mind was terrible; he became plunged in despair, and many of his friends feared that reason would desert her throne.

Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not.

If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.

Mary described herself a 'ruddy pineknot,' but in truth she was pretty and perky.

I am quite as lonesome here as [I] ever was anywhere in my life.

Lincoln wrote to Mary, expressing all kinds of discomfort.

Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress, I wish you as a personal friend of mine, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is, I would like to go very much.

Let every whig act as though he knew the result to depend upon his action.

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

There was the strangest combination of church influence against me.

I only mean that those influences levied a tax of a considerable per cent, upon my strength throughout the religious community.

In getting Baker the nomination, I shall be fixed a good deal like a fellow who is made a groomsman to a man who has cut him out and is marrying his own dear gal.

I believe you do not mean to be unjust or ungenerous; and I, therefore am slow to believe that you will not yet think better and think differently of this matter.

My childhood’s home I see again, And sadden with the view; And still, as memory crowds my brain, There’s pleasure in it too.

If by your votes you could have prevented the extension of slavery, would it not have been good and not evil to have used your votes even though it involved the casting of them for a slaveholder?

Let the pith of the whole argument be 'Turn about is fair play.'

As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself, I have concluded to do so, before long.

I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil.

This House desires to obtain a full knowledge of all the facts which to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil, at that time.

Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments.

Now I propose to show, that the whole of this,—issue and evidence—is, from the beginning to end, the sheerst deception.

I will stake my life, that if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose.

I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.

It calls up the indefinite past.

I never did, in any true sense, want the job for myself.

"How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s country no better than if one had never lived."

"Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done today."

"Discourage litigation."

"Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often the real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time."

"It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated."

"The lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man."

"When I read aloud two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better."

"I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points where I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful."

"There will still be business enough."

"Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor pertaining to it which can then be done."

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust; let us repurify it.

Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.

I do not propose to question the patriotism, or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men; but rather to strictly confine myself to the naked merits of the question.

The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application, as here attempted.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.

The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.

I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.

Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace.

I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.

May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and put it in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new.

Do they really think the right ought to yield to the wrong? Are they afraid to stand by the right?

Do they fear that the constitution is too weak to sustain them in the right?

I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.

Let us reinaugurate the good old ‘central ideas’ of the Republic.

All men are created equal.

The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered.

‘There is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.’

‘I say … let it be as nearly reached as we can.’

‘I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the Nebraska Bill began.’

‘The Savior had set up a standard of perfection but did not expect any human beings to reach it.’

‘This government of ours is founded on the white basis. It was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.’

‘Ambition has been ascribed to me; I claim no insensibility to political honors.’

‘The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.’

‘When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.’

‘I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.’

‘I am part of this people.’

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.

I admit the force of much that you say, and admit that I am ambitious, and would like to be President.

I will have no more to do with this class of business. I can do business in Court, but I can not, and will not follow executions all over the world.

In every locality we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we should disagree.

There is some probability that my Scrap-book will be reprinted.

The only danger will be the temptation to lower the Republican Standard in order to gather recruits.

The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to 'platform' for something which will be popular just there.

We hope you can, and will, contribute something to relieve us from it.

What brought these Democrats with us! The Slavery issue.

I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States.

Justice and fairness to all.

I feel in especial need of the assistance of all.

I neither am nor will be... committed to any man, clique, or faction.

My sincere wish is that both sides will allow by-gones to be bygones, and look to the present and future only.

It has been my purpose... to make no speeches.

The reward that fidelity and courage find in your person will infuse hope in many sinking bosoms.

We know not what a day may bring forth; but, today, it looks as if the Chicago ticket will be elected.

I confess with gratitude... that I did not suppose my appearance among you would create the tumult which I now witness.

Whenever I have time to think, my mind is sufficiently exercised for my comfort.

I think there will be the most extraordinary effort ever made, to carry New York for Douglas.

I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.

Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.

Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.

The sadness etched in his face was voiced in his words.

To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.

I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Don’t give up the ship. Don’t abandon her yet.

Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. Stand firm.

The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.

I would rather be assassinated on the spot than to surrender it.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every 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.

You are about to assume a position of greater responsibility than Washington ever occupied.

We have no censure for the President at this point. He only did what braver men have done.

Your case is quite like that of Jefferson.

I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these states is perpetual.

The Union is much older than the Constitution.

No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.

The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressor.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.

Although passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States.

Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?

This is essentially a People’s contest.

To elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.

The Union is not an end, but a means to an end that is more than a particular system of political organization.

With rebellion thus sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years.

In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own.

May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power.

A government of the people, by the same people can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.

Today will be known as black Monday.

The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.

I have given you carte blanche; you must use your own judgment and do the best you can.

The enthusiastic uprising of the people in our cause, is our great reliance; and we can not safely give it any check.

With a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.

It is exceedingly discouraging. As everything else, nothing can be done.

You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government. On the contrary it is itself the surrender of the government.

I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.

Draw on me for all the sense I have, and all the information.

The President is an idiot.

The poor President! He is to be pitied … trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval warfare, big guns, the movement of troops, military maps.

I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires or Congress or the country forsakes me.

It is well for us, and very comforting on such an occasion as this, to get a clear and scriptural view of the providence of God.

My poor boy. He was too good for this earth … but then we loved him so.

You have called us and we’re coming.

This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing.

We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.

I have given it much thought.

We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.

Things had gone from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope.

Without labor nothing prospers.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

We must rise with the occasion.

As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.

The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.

We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution.

What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because it helps to save the Union.

I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; I shall adopt new views so fast as they appear to be true views.

ALL PERSONS HELD AS SLAVES … SHALL BE THEN, THENCEFORWARD, AND FOREVER FREE.

What if the President fails in this trial hour, what if he now listens to the demon slavery—and rejects the entreaties of the Angel of Liberty?

I could not stop the Proclamation if I would, and would not if I could.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.

The Emancipation Proclamation was not simply a military emergency strategy, but in his mind the conception of the model of a new nation.

The colored man only waits for honorable admission into the service of the country. They know that who would be free, themselves must strike the blow, and they long for the opportunity to strike that blow.

The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.

Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.

I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you.

Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time.

I think the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war.

Such things often come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out.

The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.

Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time, then, for you to declare you will not fight to free Negroes.

And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation.

I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.

You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter.

It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.

It will be on the lips, and in the hearts of hundreds of thousands this day.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

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 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.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it cannot forget what they did here.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

Let us dedicate ourselves to the great task remaining before us.

In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.

God alone can claim it.

If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong.

The will of God prevails.

Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are in want of one.

We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when the object is attained.

This amendment is a King’s cure for all the evils.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.

Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.

To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.

Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper relations between these states and the Union.

If I were in your place, I’d let ’em up easy, let ’em up easy.

We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it.

No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

The Almighty has His own purposes.