Great Lincoln Quotes

"I was born February 12, 1809.... My earliest recollection is of the Knob Creek place." - Lincoln wrote in letters about childhood.

"I... have invented a new... manner of buoying vessels." - Lincoln said after taking a trip around the Great Lakes.

"Here I have lived a quarter of a century." - Lincoln spoke of leaving his Springfield, Illinois home.

"I... contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil." - Said Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debate of October 7, 1858. He also said, "He is blowing out the moral lights around us when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them."

"'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'... This government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." - Lincoln addressed to the Republican State Convention in Springfield on June 16, 1858.

"I... look to the American people and to that God who has never forsaken them." - Lincoln said in the Ohio State capitol on February 13, 1961.

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies." - Lincoln at his first inaugural.

"I can remember... the journey with my father and mother to Southern Indiana." - Lincoln told Leonard Swett in 1863.

"My childhood's home I see again, and sudden with the view; and still, as memory crowds my brain, there's pleasure in it too." - Lincoln wrote in a 1844 poem after he returned to Indiana.

"When Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea... Niagara was roaring here." - Lincoln when he visited the Niagara Falls in 1848.

"Excuse me now. I am going to the theater." - Lincoln said before meeting his destiny at Ford's Theatre.

And of course, less we forget his Gettysburg address:

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth." - Lincoln's most famous speech, delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863.