A few weeks ago, I made a visit to the Lincoln Memorial. I am a little embarrassed to admit that even though I have lived within a short drive to Washington DC most of my life, I had never visited the Memorial as an adult until now. With today being President’s Day, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look at one of the presidents we are celebrating, Abraham Lincoln.
Instead of writing a long winded biography of one of the most influential men of American history, I thought it best to let his own words speak for himself. Below I have listed a few Abraham Lincoln’s quotes that I find interesting when related to us and our country today.
- “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities.”
- “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated–quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.
- On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that “all men are created equal” a self evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim “a self evident lie.”–August 15, 1855 Letter to George Robertson
- “Let your military measures be strong enough to repel the invader and keep the peace, and not so strong as to unnecessarily harrass and persecute the people.”
- “Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.”
- “Every man’s happiness is his own responsibility.”
