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Abraham Lincoln Quotes
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Abraham Lincoln was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and perhaps its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, paved the way to the abolition of slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.

Born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, Lincoln grew up on the western frontier in Kentucky and Indiana. Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, and was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, in which he served for eight years. Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy and opposed the Mexican–American War. After a single term, he returned to Illinois and resumed his successful law practice. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority in Illinois. As part of the 1858 campaign for US Senator from Illinois, Lincoln took part in a series of highly publicized debates with his opponent and rival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas; Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery, but lost the race to Douglas. In 1860, Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state, though most delegates originally favored other candidates. Though he gained very little support in the slaveholding states of the South, he swept the North and was elected president in 1860.

Though there were attempts to bridge the differences between North and South, ultimately Lincoln's victory prompted seven southern slave states to secede from the United States and form the Confederate States of America before he moved into the White House. The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter inspired the North to enthusiastically rally behind the Union. As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican Party, Lincoln confronted Radical Republicans, who demanded harsher treatment of the South, War Democrats, who rallied a large faction of former opponents into his camp, anti-war Democrats , who despised him, and irreconcilable secessionists, who plotted his assassination. Lincoln fought back by pitting his opponents against each other, by carefully planned political patronage, and by appealing to the American people with his powers of oratory. His Gettysburg Address became an iconic endorsement of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. Lincoln concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war in order to reunite the nation. He suspended habeas corpus, leading to the controversial ex parte Merryman decision, and he averted potential British intervention by defusing the Trent Affair. Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of generals, including his most successful general, Ulysses S. Grant. He made major decisions on Union war strategy, including a naval blockade that shut down the South's trade. As the war progressed, his complex moves toward ending slavery included the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863; Lincoln used the U.S. Army to protect escaped slaves, encouraged the border states to outlaw slavery, and pushed through Congress the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which permanently outlawed slavery.

An astute politician deeply involved with power issues in each state, Lincoln reached out to the War Democrats and managed his own re-election campaign in the 1864 presidential election. Anticipating the war's conclusion, Lincoln pushed a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness. On April 14, 1865, five days after the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth and died the next day. Lincoln has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as among the greatest U.S. presidents.

✵ 12. February 1809 – 15. April 1865   •   Other names Abramo Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln photo
Abraham Lincoln: 618   quotes 702   likes

Abraham Lincoln Quotes

“I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.”

Abraham Lincoln

Source: Reply to Missouri Committee of Seventy (30 September 1864)

“Mister Lincoln then took up the Massachusetts shoemakers' strike, treating it in a humorous and philosophical manner, and exposing to ridicule the foolish pretense of Senator Douglas, that the strike arose from 'this unfortunate sectional warfare'. Mister Lincoln thanked God that we have a system of labor where there can be a strike. Whatever the pressure, there is a point where the workman may stop.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

God

“Abraham took an early start as a hunter, which was never much improved afterwards. A few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin, and Abraham with a rifle-gun standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.”

Abraham Lincoln

p, 125
1860s, A Short Autobiography (1860)

Game

“I wish it might be more generally and universally understood what the country is now engaged in. We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man. In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one. There is involved in this struggle the question whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to the One Hundred Sixty-fourth Ohio Regiment

Children , Question , Universe , Country

“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.”

Abraham Lincoln

Letter to George Robertson (15 August 1855)
1850s

“The truth is, that this question is one of national importance, and we cannot help dealing with it: we must do something about it, whether we will or not. We cannot avoid it; the subject is one we cannot avoid considering; we can no more avoid it than a man can live without eating. It is upon us; it attaches to the body politic as much and as closely as the natural wants attach to our natural bodies. Now I think it important that this matter should be taken up in earnest, and really settled. And one way to bring about a true settlement of the question is to understand its true magnitude.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)

Truth , Way , Understanding , Question

“My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, First Inaugural Address (1861)

Thinking , Time

“We, on our side, are praying Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, look for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?”

Abraham Lincoln

Attributed in 1861, as quoted in The Life of Abraham Lincoln: Drawn from Original Sources https://books.google.com/books?id=3WMDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA124&dq=%22What+must+he+think+of+us%22 (1900), Volume 3, New York: Lincoln History Society, p. 124
Posthumous attributions

Thinking , Victory

“Abraham Lincoln is my name
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
and left it here for fools to read”

Abraham Lincoln

Manuscript poem, as a teenager (ca. 1824–1826), in "Lincoln as Poet" at Library of Congress : Presidents as Poets http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/al.html, as published in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) edited by Roy. P. Basler, Vol. 1
1820s

Fools , Reading , Speed

“I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky!”

Abraham Lincoln

See, for example, Albert D. Richardson (1865), The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape. The quotation is based on a comment by Rev. Moncure D. Conway about the progress of the Civil War.
It is evident that the worthy President would like to have God on his side: he must have Kentucky.
Moncure D. Conway (1862), The Golden Hour
Misattributed

God , Hope

“There is no room for two distinct races of white men in America, much less for two distinct races of whites and blacks. I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the Negro into our social and political life as an equal… Within twenty years we can peacefully colonize the Negro in the tropics and give him our language, literature, religion, and system of government under conditions in which he can rise to the full measure of manhood. This he can never do here. We can never attain the ideal Union our fathers dreamed, with millions of an alien, inferior race among us, whose assimilation is neither possible nor desirable.”

Abraham Lincoln

This is from a fictional speech by Lincoln which occurs in The Clansman : An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) by Thomas Dixon, Jr.. On some sites this has been declared to be something Lincoln said "soon after signing" the Emancipation Proclamation, but without any date or other indications of to whom it was stated, and there are no actual historical records of Lincoln ever saying this.
Misattributed

Life , Men , Religion , Dreams

“He didn't pretend to be familiar with the subject of the shoe strike, probably knew as little about it as Senator Douglas himself. This strike has occurred as the Senator says, or it has not. Shall we stop making war upon the South? We never have made war upon them. If any one has, better go and hang himself and save Virginia the trouble. If you give up your convictions and call slavery right as they do, you let slavery in upon you, instead of white laborers who can strike, you'll soon have black laborers who can't strike.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

War , Shoe

“The democrats had just been whipped in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and seized upon the unfortunate Harper's Ferry affair to influence other elections then pending. They said to each other, 'Jump in, now's your chance', and were sorry there were not more killed. But they didn't succeed well. Let them go on with their howling. They will succeed when by slandering women you get them to love you, and by slandering men you get them to vote for you.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Love , Women , Men , Chance

“He desires to preserve the Government, that it may be administered for all as it was administered by the men who made it. Loyal citizens everywhere have the right to claim this of their government, and the government has no right to withhold or neglect it. It is not perceived that in giving it there is any coercion, any conquest, or any subjugation in any just sense of those terms.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Fourth of July Address to Congress (1861)

Men , Sense

“And I do further proclaim, declare, and make known, that whenever, in any of the States of Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, a number of persons, not less than one-tenth in number of the votes cast in such State at the Presidential election of the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty, each having taken the oath aforesaid and not having since violated it, and being a qualified voter by the election law of the State existing immediately before the so-called act of secession, and excluding all others, shall re-establish a State government which shall be republican, and in no wise contravening said oath, such shall be recognized as the true government of the State, and the State shall receive thereunder the benefits of the constitutional provision which declares that "The United States shall guaranty to every State in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and, on application of the legislature, or the executive, (when the legislature cannot be convened,) against domestic violence."”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (1863)

Law , Personality

“From the first appearance of man upon the earth, down to very recent times, the words "stranger" and "enemy" were quite or almost, synonymous. Long after civilized nations had defined robbery and murder as high crimes, and had affixed severe punishments to them, when practiced among and upon their own people respectively, it was deemed no offence, but even meritorious, to rob, and murder, and enslave strangers, whether as nations or as individuals. Even yet, this has not totally disappeared. The man of the highest moral cultivation, in spite of all which abstract principle can do, likes him whom he does know, much better than him whom he does not know. To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy, and from positive enmity, among strangers, as nations, or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.”

Abraham Lincoln

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

People , Spring , Appearance , Evil

“There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief — resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.”

Abraham Lincoln

Fragment, Notes for a Law Lecture (1 July 1850), cited in Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, Comprising his Speeches, Letters, State Papers, and Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. 2 (1894)
1850s

People , Law , Confidence , Universe

“The negative principle that no law is free law, is not much known except among lawyers.”

Abraham Lincoln

1850s, Speech at Peoria, Illinois (1854)

Law

“The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed were being resisted and failing of execution in nearly one-third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to their execution some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen's liberty that practically it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent, should to a very limited extent be violated? To state the question more directly, Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?”

Abraham Lincoln

Source: 1860s, Fourth of July Address to Congress (1861)

Law , Question

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Abraham Lincoln

First Debate with Stephen Douglas in the Lincoln-Douglas debates http://www.bartleby.com/251/ of the 1858 campaign for the U.S. Senate, at Ottawa, Illinois (21 August 1858). Lincoln later quoted himself and repeated this statement in his first Inaugural Address (4 March 1861) to emphasize that any acts of secession were over-reactions to his election. During the war which followed his election he eventually declared the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in those states in rebellion against the union, arguably as a war measure rather than as an entirely political or moral initiative.
1850s, Lincoln–Douglas debates (1858)

Law

“Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.”

Abraham Lincoln

Speech at Springfield, Illinois (26 June 1857)
1850s, Speech on the Dred Scott Decision (1857)

Spring , Sense

“Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Letter to Alexander H. Stephens (1860)

People , Fear , Hope

“I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.”

Abraham Lincoln

Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress on (15 April 1861) http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/proc-1.htm
1860s

Effort

“When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.”

Abraham Lincoln

Quoted by Charles A. Dana in his book [http://books.google.com/books?id=rxpCAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA274&q=elephant
1860s

“What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can be safely prescribed as to details and colatterals. Such exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Last public address (1865)

Change

“Negro equality! Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagougeism as this?”

Abraham Lincoln

Fragments: Notes for Speeches, September 1859, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) Vol. III; No transcripts or reports exist indicating that he ever actually used this expression in any of his speeches.
1850s

God , Fools , Universe

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, First Inaugural Address (1861)

People , Exercises , Country

“Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Emancipation Proclamation (1863)

People , Faith , Effort , Freedom

“Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

Abraham Lincoln

1850s, Speech at Chicago (1858)

Men , People

“In law it is a good policy never to plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you cannot.”

Abraham Lincoln

Letter to former Illinois Attorney General Usher F. Linder (20 February 1848)
1840s

Law

“In the present "situation" as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Last public address (1865)

People

“To do this the constitutional administration of our government must be sustained, and I beg of you not to allow your minds or your hearts to be diverted from the support of all necessary measures for that purpose, by any miserable picayune arguments addressed to your pockets, or inflammatory appeals made to your passions or your prejudices.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to One Hundred Forty-eighth Ohio Regiment (1864)

Support , Passion , Heart

“From this place he removed to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in the autumn of 1816. Abraham then being in his eighth year. …though very young, was large for his age, and had an ax put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument — less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, A Short Autobiography (1860)

Age , Autumn , Season

“I think very much of the people, as an old friend said he thought of woman. He said when he lost his first wife, who had been a great help to him in his business, he thought he was ruined — that he could never find another to fill her place. At length, however, he married another, who he found did quite as well as the first, and that his opinion now was that any woman would do well who was well done by. So I think of the whole people of this nation — they will ever do well if well done by. We will try to do well by them in all parts of the country, North and South, with entire confidence that all will be well with all of us.”

Abraham Lincoln

Remarks at Bloomington, Illinois (21 November 1860); published in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) by Roy P. Basler, vol. 4, p. 143
1860s

People , Confidence , Business , Thinking

“My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”

Abraham Lincoln

Letter to Judge J. A. Wakefield, after the death of Lincoln's son Willie in 1862, as cited in Abraham Lincoln: was he a Christian? (1893), p. 292 http://books.google.com/books?id=x8BHAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA292&dq=%22unsoundness+of+the+Christian+scheme%22, by John Eleazer Remsburg. Historian Merrill Daniel Peterson states in Lincoln in American Memory (1994), p. 227 http://books.google.com/books?id=D_FjY_ARcGoC&lpg=PA227&vq=%22Judge%20J.%20A.%20Wakefield%22&pg=PA227, that the letter has never actually been produced to verify the statement and that there's no correspondence with Wakefield noted in the Collected Works.
Misattributed

Thinking , Change

“As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar —
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.”

Abraham Lincoln

Canto I
1840s, My Childhood's Home I See Again (1844 - 1846)

Memory

“Stop, you political tramp. You, the aider and abettor of those who have brought all this ruin upon your country, without the courage to risk your person in defense of the principles you profess to espouse! A fellow who stood by to gather up the loaves and fishes, if any should fall to you! A man who had no principles in the North, and took none South with him! A political hyena who robbed the graves of the dead, and adopted their language as his own! You talk of the North cutting the throats of the Southern people. You have all cut your own throats, and, unfortunately, have cut many of those of the North. Miserable impostor, vile intruder! Go, before I forget myself and the high position I hold! Go, I tell you, and don't desecrate this national vessel another minute!”

Abraham Lincoln

To Duff Green, aboard the USS Malvern http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1865-04-04&r=L0NhbGVuZGFyWWVhci5hc3B4P3llYXI9MTg2NSZyPUwwTmhiR1Z1WkdGeUxtRnpjSGc9 (4 April 1865), as quoted in Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War https://archive.org/details/incidentsanecdot00portiala (1885), by David Dixon Porter, p. 308
1860s

People , Courage , Fish , Personality

“By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority — reconstruction — which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike a case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Last public address (1865)

War , People , Success

“If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”

Abraham Lincoln

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

Life , Nature , Dependency

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!”

Abraham Lincoln

Upon proclaiming a National Fast Day (30 March 1863)
1860s

Wisdom , God , Peace , Feeling

“When I left Springfield I asked the people to pray for me. I was not a Christian. When I buried my son, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I do love Jesus.”

Abraham Lincoln

This anecdote apparently dates from 1864 Massachusetts Sunday School Teachers' Convention.
This has been portrayed to have been Lincoln's "reply" to an unnamed Illinois clergyman when asked if he loved Jesus, as quoted in The Lincoln Memorial Album — Immortelles (1882) edited by Osborn H. Oldroyd [New York: G.W. Carleton & Co. p. 366 http://books.google.com/books?id=pX5DEhCM9M0C&pg=RA10-PA366&lpg=RA10-PA366&dq=%22and+saw+the+graves+of+thousands+of+our+soldiers%22&source=web&ots=Alddnu8KL8&sig=IhhhPHp6tuB7FoiRI8c71w5NUH4#PRA10-PA365,M1
This incident must have appeared in print immediately after Lincoln's death, for I find it quoted in memorial addresses of May, 1865. Mr Oldroyd has endeavored to learn for me in what paper he found it and on whose authority it rests, but without result. He does not remember where he found it. It is inherently improbable, and rests on no adequate testimony. It ought to be wholly disregarded. The earliest reference I have found to the story in which Lincoln is alleged to have said to an unnamed Illinois minister, "I do love Jesus" is in a sermon preached in the Baptist Church of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, April 19, 1865, by Rev. W. W. Whitcomb, which was published in the Oshkosh Northwestern, April 21, 1865, and in 1907 issued in pamphlet form by John E. Burton.
William Eleazar Barton (1920) The Soul of Abraham Lincoln http://books.google.com/books?id=UDEOAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA208&lpg=RA1-PA208&dq=%22and+saw+the+graves+of+thousands+of+our+soldiers%22&source=web&ots=kDphIXKsy-&sig=GclPy5wecnvSuGHYO2R1bhb6lUQ. Further discussion appears in They Never Said It (1989) by Paul F. Boller & John George, p. 91.
Disputed

Love , Life , People , Christ

“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”

Abraham Lincoln

Alledgedly from a speech to the Illinois House of Representatives (18 December 1840) its called "a remarkable piece of spurious Lincolniana" by Merrill D. Peterson: Lincoln in American Memory. Oxford UP 1995, books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=EADk9ZIMJXEC&q=prohibitory#v=page. Cf.Spurious archive.org https://archive.org/details/abrahamlincolnqulinc_41 and Harry Miller Lydenberg: Lincoln and Prohibition, Blazes on a Zigzag Trail. Proceedings Of The American Antiquarian Society, No. 1/1952 pdf http://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44807229.pdf.
Misattributed

Law

“If those democrats really think slavery wrong they will be much pleased when earnest men in the slave states take up a plan of gradual emancipation and go to work energetically and very kindly to get rid of the evil. Now let us test them. Frank Blair tried it; and he ran for Congress in '58, and got beaten. Did the democracy feel bad about it? I reckon not, I guess you all flung up your hats and shouted 'Hurrah for the Democracy!”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Men , Feeling , Democracy , Thinking

“I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement. And I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God's will I will do. I trust that in the freedom with which I have canvassed your views I have not in any respect injured your feelings.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Reply to an Emancipation Memorial (1862)

God , Feeling , Freedom , Appearance

“I suppose you are going home to see your families and friends. For the service you have done in this great struggle in which we are engaged I present you sincere thanks for myself and the country.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to the One Hundred Sixty-sixth Ohio Regiment

Family , Home , Sincerity , Country

“The several points of the Dred Scott decision, in connection with Senator Douglas's "care-not" policy, constitute the piece of machinery, in its present state of advancement. This was the third point gained. The working points of that machinery are: (1) That no negro slave, imported as such from Africa, and no descendant of such slave, can ever be a citizen of any State, in the sense of that term as used in the Constitution of the United States. This point is made in order to deprive the negro in every possible event of the benefit of that provision of the United States Constitution which declares that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." (2) That, "subject to the Constitution of the United States," neither Congress nor a territorial legislature can exclude slavery from any United States Territory. This point is made in order that individual men may fill up the Territories with slaves, without danger of losing them as property, and thus enhance the chances of permanency to the institution through all the future. (3) That whether the holding a negro in actual slavery in a free State makes him free as against the holder, the United States courts will not decide, but will leave to be decided by the courts of any slave State the negro may be forced into by the master. This point is made not to be pressed immediately, but, if acquiesced in for a while, and apparently indorsed by the people at an election, then to sustain the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott in the free State of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one or one thousand slaves in Illinois or in any other free State.”

Abraham Lincoln

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Men , People , Decision , Sense

“My friends, this is a wholly unprepared speech. I did not expect to be called upon to say a word when I came here. I supposed I was merely to do something towards raising a flag. I may, therefore, have said something indiscreet, but I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and, in the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Speech in Independence Hall (1861)

God , Pleasure

“"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.”

Abraham Lincoln

In this famous statement, Lincoln is quoting the response of Jesus Christ to those who accused him of being able to cast out devils because he was empowered by the Prince of devils, recorded in Matthew 12:25: "And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand".
1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Housing

“With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Abraham Lincoln

1860s, Second Inaugural Address (1865)

God , Peace

“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.”

Abraham Lincoln

Attributed in Lincoln the Lawyer (1906) by Frederick Trevor Hill — Hill noted that he could find no record of whom Lincoln was insulting.
Posthumous attributions

Idea