When someone asked Abraham Lincoln, after he was elected president, what he was going to do about his enemies, he replied, "I am going to destroy them. I am going to make them my friends."

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Force is all conquering, but it's victories are short lived.

Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice.

no man who is resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention, still less can he afford to take the consequences, including the vitiation of his temper and the loss of self control, yield to larger things to which you show no more than equal rights, and yield to lesser ones though clearly your own, better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right, not even killing the dog, will cure the bite

As the problems are new, we must disenthrall ourselves from the past.

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.