Abraham

"My early ambition was to be a printer, which explains my fondness for the power of the press."

"I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice."

"The real thing to do is to stop legislation based on public clamor."

"Life for me ain't been no crystal stair, yet I keep climbing."

"The better angels of our nature will triumph if we let them."

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view."

"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."

"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion."

"A nation may be said to consist of its soil and its people, not of the form of its government."

"I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody."

"I have been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes real love, to stay in the arena."

"Surely God would not have created such a being as man to have an utter and absolute end."

"It has long been a grave question whether any belief should be held by anybody if there be not in the world some effort to show its falsehood."

"I will prepare and some day my chance will come."

"The man who has never made a mistake will never try anything new."

"We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

"If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem."

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

"I hope to stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong."

"The will of God prevails, and to his will I yield."

"A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others."

"Those who are really in earnest must not object to the means of saving the Union all peaceful ones being exhausted."

"My father's memory is very precious to me—though I was but a child when he died."

"I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would express with visible sympathy in the expression of another."

"The question recurs what good is poetry at all? Shall the pages of a great nation's natal struggle be read by future generations?"

"The most reliable way to predict the future is to understand the present."

"I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the republican liberty shall be perpetuated."

"Understanding the moment is the key to affecting its outcome."

"In the last analysis, a man's religion is the influence which moves him to action."

"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."