Abraham Lincoln

"The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them."

"To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life."

"My Supreme Court does not have the final word on Constitutional questions."

"I am troubled when I cease to be troubled."

"No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar."

"I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an asserted claim without evidence can have it dismissed without evidence."

"I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had lost its liberty."

"The mystic chords of memory will swell the chorus of the Union."

"My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are contented with failure."

"Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world."

"I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause I most care about."

"A lawyer's time and advice are his stock in trade."

"I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others."

"In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."

"Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?"

"I would say then that, for the purpose of keeping the issues made by the genesis of this war in view, we should not lose sight of another prominent fact—that constitutional questions are not settled by the opinion of any one man, however great."

"Truth is generally the best vindication against slander."

"He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help."

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."

"Avoid popularity if you would have peace."

"I am not much of a judge of beauty, but I do know what ugliness is."

"The human mind never fully accepts or rejects without pause the judgment of another."

"If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend."

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words 'And this, too, shall pass away.'"

"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."

"Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived."

"I have always believed that one man and woman constituting themselves into a marriage relation and sticking to it means more for the race and for the nation than 10,000 sterile friendships."

"My old, withered grandmother said it, but it is new and beautiful to me."

"How hard it is to believe that I have had the influence I have had."

"Let no young man choosing the law for a profession suppose that he will have too much time for other things."