Abraham Lincoln Quotes

“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“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.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
― Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings 1832–1858

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“There are but two types of men who desire war: those who haven’t the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and those who haven’t the slightest idea what it is. … Any man who has seen the face of death knows better than to seek him out a second time.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

“That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Women are the only people I am afraid of who I never thought would hurt me”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both *may* be, and one *must* be, wrong. God cannot be *for* and *against* the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party - and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaption to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true - that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either *saved* or *destroyed* the Union without human contest. Yet the contest began, And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“When Lincoln was asked if God was on the Union’s side, Lincoln’s unvarying response was that what was really important was whether they were on God’s side.”
― Joe Wheeler, Abraham Lincoln, a Man of Faith and Courage: Stories of Our Most Admired President

“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.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all mean are created free and equal.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

“If Mr. Fantastic and Professor X had a baby, there would be tons of questions, but also it would be Abraham Lincoln.”
― Daniel O'Brien, How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country

“What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Lincoln grew immeasurably as he came to think of himself as an “instrument of God’s will.”
― Joe Wheeler, Abraham Lincoln, a Man of Faith and Courage: Stories of Our Most Admired President

“The bottom half of the page had descended into a doodle of a tiny man giving the middle finger to a giant, angry eagle with razor-sharp talons. Beneath it, the caption: To Mock a Killing Bird.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith

“Not married until 33, Abraham Lincoln said, "A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that cannot hurt me.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“They took it for more than it was, or anyhow for more than it said; the container was greater than the thing contained, and Lincoln became at once what he would remain for them, “the man who freed the slaves.” He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic-which he was-but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Man’s glory lies not, Lincoln thought, in ‘his goodness,’ for this is often nonexistent. He derives glory, instead, from his being made in the image of the Living God.”
― Joe Wheeler, Abraham Lincoln, a Man of Faith and Courage: Stories of Our Most Admired President

“A visitor asked Lincoln what good news he could take home from an audience with the august executive. The president spun a story about a machine that baffled a chess champion by beating him thrice. The stunned champ cried while inspecting the machine, "There's a man in there!"Lincoln's good news, he confided from the heights of leadership, was that there was in fact a man in there.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“But where Lincoln’s absent hand was felt most keenly was in race relations. Black codes were passed in state after state across the South—as restrictive as the antebellum laws governing free blacks (Richmond’s old laws had even regulated the carrying of canes). These codes propounded segregation, banned intermarriage, provided for special punishments for blacks, and, in one state, Mississippi, also prevented the ownership of land. Not even a congressional civil rights bill, passed over Johnson’s veto, could undo them. For their part, the Northern states were little better. During Reconstruction, employing a deadly brew of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and property qualifications, they abridged the right to vote more extensively than did their Southern counterparts.”
― Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month That Saved America

“Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year’s, 1863.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

[Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s 701-word second inaugural address, delivered at the United States Capitol on March 4, 1865.]”
― Edward Achorn , Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln

“Abraham Lincoln suffered through depression through his life and then suffered through the pain of conducting a civil war, and emerged with the sense that Providence had taken control of his life, that he was a small instrument in a transcendent task.”
― David Brooks

“Abraham Lincoln was correct when he said that less than one-half day's cost of the Civil War could have purchased the freedom of all the slaves in Delaware.

The Civil War cost the two sides a total of $6.6 billion in 1860s dollars, enough to buy the freedom of all the slaves at their 1860 market value, give each slave family 40 acres and a mule and make $3.5 billion in reparations to former slaves in lieu of 100 years of back wages.”
― Claudia Goldin

“I can make a General in five minutes, but a good horse is hard to replace.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“During the Civil War, especially in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, idealists from many corners of Europe crossed the Atlantic to join the crusade against slavery. In New York, an international brigade named in honor of Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi was formed to assist the army of Lincoln. Declared Garibaldi: “The American question is about life for the liberty of the world.” A less rosy assessment, from a very different source, came many years later: “The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery were destroyed by that war,” lamented Adolf Hitler, “and with them also the embryo of a truly great America.”

Hitler fantasized that the United States so fully shared his racist views that it would ultimately side with the Third Reich. Nazi writers regularly pointed to America’s anti-Asian immigration quotas and bigoted Jim Crow laws to deflect foreign criticism of their own discriminatory statutes. Even the German quest for Lebensraum found its model in America’s westward expansion, during which, as Hitler noted, U.S. soldiers and frontiersmen “gunned down … millions of Redskins.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“You know that feeling when you kiss your dog's butthole goodnight but it tastes like your uncle's balls?
This means that your dog is family. Feed it to your deformed baby with a side of apple sauce and Chromebook salad.”
― John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln and Boston Corbett, with Personal Recollections of Each

“This guy is the spitting image of Lincoln," Giordino remarked conversationally.
"That IS Abraham Lincoln," came Perlmutter's subdued voice from the doorway. He slowly sank to the deck, his back against the bulkhead, like a whale settling to the seabed. His eyes were locked on the corpse in the rocking chair as if hypnotically fixed.
Pitt stared at Perlmutter with concern and obvious skepticism. "For a renowned historian, you've taken a wrong turn, haven't you?"
Giordino knelt beside Perlmutter and offered him a drink from a water bottle. "The heat must be getting to you, big buddy."
Perlmutter waved away the water. "God oh God, I couldn't bring myself to believe it. But Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin McMasters Stanton, DID reveal the truth in his secret papers."
"What truth?" asked Pitt, curious.
He hesitated, and then his voice came almost in a whisper. "Lincoln was not shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre. That is him sitting in that rocking chair.”
― Clive Cussler, Sahara