Abraham Lincoln

Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day.

The leading rule for a lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence.

I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.

I will prepare and someday my chance will come.

There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.

Allow me to assure you that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation.

The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him.

You must not wait to be brought forward by the older men.

It would astonish, if not amuse, the older citizens to learn that I (a stranger, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat at ten dollars per month) have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and…

However strictly the citizen may exclude from his premises all foreign luxuries, fine cloths, fine silks, rich wines, golden chains, and diamond rings,--still, for the possession of his house, his barn, and his homespun he is to be…

In short, by this system the burden of revenue falls almost entirely on the wealthy and luxurious few, while the substantial and labouring many, who live at home and upon home products, go entirely free.

By this system, the man who contents himself to live upon the products of his own country pays nothing at all.

And, again, by the tariff system the whole revenue is paid by the consumers of foreign goods, and those chiefly the luxuries and not the necessaries of life.

As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and next, no one left to borrow from, so must it be with a government.

It is a system not only ruinous while it lasts, but one that must soon fail and leave us destitute.

Still, in addition to this there is something so ludicrous in promises of good or threats of evil a great way off as to render the whole subject with which they are connected easily turned into ridicule.

Pleasures to be enjoyed, or pains to be endured, after we shall be dead and gone, are but little regarded even in our own cases, and much less in the cases of others.

Great distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind.

What an ignorance of human nature does it exhibit, to ask or expect a whole community to rise up and labour for the temporal happiness of others, after themselves shall be consigned to the dust, a majority of which community take no pains…

Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.

Few can be induced to labour exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically.

It looked so fiendishly selfish, so like throwing fathers and brothers overboard to lighten the boat for our security, that the noble-minded shrank from the manifest meanness of the thing.

The heart could not throw open its portals to it, the generous man could not adopt it--it could not mix with his blood.

We could not love the man who taught it--we could not hear him with patience.

There is in this something so repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless, that it never did, nor never can enlist the enthusiasm of a popular cause.