You can't help the poor by being one of them.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Every man's happiness is his own responsibility.

As President, I have no eyes but constitutional eyes; I cannot see you.

Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.

Every blade of grass is a study; and to produce two, where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure.

Lincoln called laughter "the joyous, beautiful, universal evergreen of life."