Abraham Lincoln

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

A long visit to a friend is often a great bore. Never make people twice glad.

A fellow once came to me to ask for an appointment as a minister abroad. Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally, he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers. It is sometimes well to be humble.

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.

Dear Sir: Yours of the 24th. asking 'the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law' is received. The mode is very simple, though laborious, and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read, and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone's Commentaries, and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty's Pleading, Greenleaf's Evidence, & Story's Equity &c. in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing.

Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.

Law is nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind.

If you intend to go to work there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you can not get along anywhere.

And I am glad to know that there is a system of labor - where the laborer can strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world.

The world is agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied. There is no dispute upon this point.

Labor is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human comforts and necessities are drawn.

No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.

If at any time all labour should cease, and all existing provisions be equally divided among the people, at the end of a single year there could scarcely be one human being left alive--all would have perished by want of subsistence.

If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creature.

So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly selfish way; for although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

I did say, at Chicago, in my speech there, that I do wish to see the spread of slavery arrested and to see it placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.

Now, I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil, having due regard for its actual existence amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way, and to all the constitutional obligations which have been thrown about it; but, nevertheless, desire a policy that looks to the prevention of it as a wrong, and looks hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end.

I do not wish to be misunderstood upon this subject of slavery in this country. I suppose it may long exist, and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time. But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end.

If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already.

I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution.