Quote collection
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"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."
"My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance."
"All I have learned, I learned from books."
"But for that Book, we could not know right from wrong."
"Don't pray that God's on our side, pray that we're on his side."
"He will have to learn, I know, that all people are not just- that all men and women are not true. Teach him that for every scoundrel there is a hero that for every enemy there is a friend. Let him learn early that the bullies are the easiest people to lick."
"A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations...is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism."
"In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party."
"I never trusted a man who never smoked or drank."
"The occasion is piled high with difficulty. We must rise to the occasion."
"I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us."
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?"
"I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."
"Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world."
"We think slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the territories, where our votes will reach it."
"When I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three.... The little advanceI now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity."
"The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves."
"In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in the making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it."
"When I go hear a man speak, I like to hear him speak like he's fighting a swarm of bees."
"We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."