Abraham Lincoln: Trending quotes (page 13)

“I mean the powerful influence which the interesting scenes of the Revolution had upon the passions of the people as distinguished from their judgment. By this influence, the jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were for the time in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive, while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature, were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest cause — that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty. But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it. I do not mean to say that the scenes of the Revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten, but that, like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time. In history, we hope, they will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read; but even granting that they will, their influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then they cannot be so universally known nor so vividly felt as they were by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family — a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related — a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done — the leveling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-restless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, then to sink and be no more. They were pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have crumbled away that temple must fall unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”

Abraham Lincoln

1830s, The Lyceum Address (1838)

Hate , People , Lie , World

“One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Second Inaugural Address (1865)

War , Color , Parting

“I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do, what you finally did, march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition, and the like, could succeed. When you got below, and took Port-Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join General Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”

Abraham Lincoln

Letter to Ulysses S. Grant http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/grant.htm (13 July 1863), Washington, D.C.
1860s

Fear , Faith , Hope , Personality

“I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.”

Abraham Lincoln

Reply to delegation from the National Union League approving and endorsing "the nominations made by the Union National Convention at Baltimore." New York Times, Herald, and Tribune (10 June 1864) Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 7 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;rgn=div1;view=text;idno=lincoln7;node=lincoln7%3A852
To a delegation of the National Union League who congratulated him on his nomination as the Republican candidate for President, June 9, 1864. As given by J. F. Rhodes—Hist. of the U. S. from the Compromise of 1850, Volume IV, p. 370. Same in Nicolay and Hay Lincoln's Complete Works, Volume II, p. 532. Different version in Appleton's Cyclopedia. Raymond—Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, Chapter XVIII, p. 500. (Ed. 1865) says Lincoln quotes an old Dutch farmer, "It was best not to swap horses when crossing a stream".
Variant: I do not allow myself to suppose that either the convention or the League, have concluded to decide that I am either the greatest or the best man in America, but rather they have concluded it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might not make a botch of it in trying to swap. note
Source: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;rgn=div1;view=text;idno=lincoln7;node=lincoln7%3A852 Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 7

Horse , Country

“I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty-two. At twenty-one I came to Illinois, Macon County. Then I got to New Salem, at that time in Sangamon, now in Menard County, where I remained a year as a sort of clerk in a store.”

Abraham Lincoln

p, 125
1850s, Autobiographical Sketch Written for Jesse W. Fell (1859)

Time

“A civil war occurring in a country, where foreigners reside and carry on trade under treaty stipulations is necessarily fruitful of complaints of the violation of neutral rights. All such collisions tend to excite misapprehensions, and possibly to produce mutual reclamations between nations which have a common interest in preserving peace and friendship.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Second State of the Union address (1862)

Friendship , War , Peace , Country

“Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.”

Abraham Lincoln

This quote is frequently purposefully misattributed to Lincoln or others long dead before the age of the internet in order to emphasize its point using humour; not all such attributions, or other claims, found on the Internet are as obviously flawed. " "Cite and sound: the pleasures and pitfalls of quoting people", by Tom Calverley, The Guardian (14 October 2014) http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/oct/14/mind-your-language-quotations
Variations:
Don't believe everything you read online.
Don't trust everything you see on the Internet.
Everything you read on the Internet is true.
The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you never know whether or not they're genuine.
Misattributed

Reading

“We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Last public address (1865)

Home

“It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to the field, more nurses to the hospital, and more prayers to Heaven than any. God bless the Methodist Church — bless all the churches — and blessed be to God, who, in this our great trial, giveth us the churches.”

Abraham Lincoln

To the 1864 general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, as quoted in Abraham Lincoln : A History Vol. 6 (1890) by John George Nicolay and John Hay, Ch. 15, p. 324
1860s

God

“I do not consider that I have ever accomplished anything without God; and if it is His will that I must die by the hand of an assassin, I must be resigned. I must do my duty as I see it, and leave the rest with God.”

Abraham Lincoln

As quoted in Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (1892) by Henry Clay Witney
Posthumous attributions

God

“Military glory, — that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood.”

Abraham Lincoln

Speech in the United States House of Representatives opposing the Mexican war ( 12 January 1848 http://books.google.com/books?id=wiuRyJK6OocC&pg=PA106&dq=rainbow)
1840s

“I insist, that if there is ANY THING which it is the duty of the WHOLE PEOPLE to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions.”

Abraham Lincoln

1850s, Speech at Peoria, Illinois (1854)

People

“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination — piece of machinery so to speak — compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision.”

Abraham Lincoln

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Law , Decision

“Any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure.”

Abraham Lincoln

Not by Lincoln, this is apparently paraphrased from remarks about honoring him by Hugh Gordon Miller: "I do not believe in forever dragging over or raking up some phases of the past; in some respects the dead past might better be allowed to bury its dead, but the nation which fails to honor its heroes, the memory of its heroes, whether those heroes be living or dead, does not deserve to live, and it will not live, and so it came to pass that in 1909 nearly a hundred millions of people [...] were singing the praises of Abraham Lincoln." — from [http://www.archive.org/details/reportsons00sonsuoft "Lincoln, the Preserver of the Union" (22 February 1911), an address to the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York.
Misattributed