The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.
When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.
When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.
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.
With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.