America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us...

I believe very profoundly in an over-ruling Providence, and I do not fear that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It maynot be intended that I shall be President--but that would not break my heart.

The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one's mind with other men's thoughts is to have no thoughts of one's own.

If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.

It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their indepdence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery...and the world, it might be hoped, would see it as a moral war, not a political; and the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not for the South.

It has become a people's war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved inits sweeping processes of change and settlement.

The object of love is to serve, not to win