The ballot is stronger than the bullet. Abraham Lincoln
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise – with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We – even we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility. 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. Abraham Lincoln, message to Congress December 1862
The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers.
The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.
By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges.
The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matter of practical administrators.
The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity.
Democracy will rise, superior to the money power. Abraham Lincoln, cited Permanent Distribution of National Production p89
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. Abraham Lincoln, first Inaugural address
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. Abraham Lincoln
... The spread of slavery, I can not but hate. 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 – enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites – causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty – criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest. Abraham Lincoln, speech Illinois October 1854
The struggle of today is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also. Abraham Lincoln, annual address to Congress 1861
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. Abraham Lincoln, first inaugural address
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. Abraham Lincoln, letter to H L Pierce April 1859
Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the Earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio river, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live for ever or die by suicide. Abraham Lincoln, cited Benjamin R Barber 1838
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. Abraham Lincoln, cited The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, editor Roy Basler
When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism. If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another. Abraham Lincoln, cited The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle, the sheet-anchor of American republicanism ... Now the relation of master and slave is pro tanto a total violation of this principle. The master not only governs the slave without his consent, but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is self-government. ibid.
Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it, in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak. ibid.
Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government’. These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other. ibid.
Without slavery the rebellion would never have existed; without slavery it could not continue. Abraham Lincoln, second annual message 1st December 1862
You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you. Abraham Lincoln, cited Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
The generation from 1830 to 1860 was perhaps one of the greatest generations of white people we have had in this country. They were very much like the civil rights generation of the 1960s and the 1970s. They marched, they organised against slavery, they organised in the churches, they staged sit-ins, they refused to capture fugitive slaves, and they prepared the ground which made it possible for emancipation to triumph. Lincoln did absolutely nothing. Lerone Bennett, historian
Lincoln is a million dollar industry, a hundred million dollar industry. Lerone Bennett
Everything I have learned about Abraham Lincoln is a lie. Lerone Bennett
Abraham Lincoln wanted to deport all black people ... He wanted to create a white state here. Now, if Abraham Lincoln had his way there would be no Obama in the United States. They would be no Oprah Winfrey. There would be no Tiger Woods. Lerone Bennett
He is not the great emancipator. Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University
When Abraham Lincoln was shovelled into the tombs,
he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ...
in the dust, in the cool tombs. Carl Sandburg, Cool Tombs, 1918
The Civil War rages on, and the North is on the verge of defeat. For President Abraham Lincoln time is running out. Desperate for a victory he will bring a new weapon to the battlefield – Lincoln becomes the first commander in chief to discover the power of electronic message. Lincoln @ Gettysburg, PBS 2014
Standing on the battlefield, Lincoln delivers the most famous two hundred and seventy-two words every spoken by an American. ibid.
Nearly 50,000 men have been killed or maimed at Gettysburg. ibid.
Abraham Lincoln is the most celebrated figure in American history ... An historic battle is being waged for the reputation of America’s sixteenth president ... Lincoln’s critics claim he plunged the nation into an unnecessary war. And that generations of historians have conspired to hide the fact that the great emancipator was in reality a racist who planned to deport the slaves out of America. Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner? BBC 2011
From the moment of his death the real Abraham Lincoln has been obscured by the almost religious cult that surrounds him. ibid.