Abe Lincoln Quotes

The Emancipation Proclamation

President Abraham Lincoln's famous words, emancipating all slaves in the territories of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, are brought to life through an engaging performance.

"God must love the common man, he made so many of them."

"I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union."

"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."

"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party - and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose."

"I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."

"In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong."

"Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

"Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality."

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

Lincoln's Prose: Major Works of a Great American Writer

A 2 hours 50 minutes audiobook download on the speeches, essays and other writings including 'The Gettysburg Address' and 'The Second Inaugural Address'.

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."

"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 exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."

"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."

"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."

"I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects---certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

"You think slavery is right and should be extended; while we think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us."

Lincoln's Letters: The Private Man and the Warrior

Lincoln comes alive through the reading of his letters.

Audio Best of the Year - Publishers Weekly, 10 BEST - Library Journal

"A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me."

"I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, God bless the women of America!"

"Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory."