In honor of Presient Lincoln's turning 199 years old today, here are some of my favorite quotes of his...
"If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."
"I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day."
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. 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."
"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."
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
"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."
"I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union."
"Stand with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and PART with him when he goes wrong."
"When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to away, it's best to let him run."
"Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored."
"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
"Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves."
"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met." - speaking of a lawyer
And my personal favorite...
"'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."
