Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
The trouble with too many people is they believe the realm of truth always lies within their vision.
More Quotes from Abraham Lincoln
I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act. . . . Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty.
The resources, advantages, and the powers of the American people are very great, and they have, consequently, succeed to equally great responsibilities.
More Quotes from Brookings
More on These Topics
Consensus: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: 'I stand for consensus?
No man can afford to express, through words and acts, that which is not in harmony with his own beliefs, and if he does so, he may pay by the loss of his ability to influence others.
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.
Plant seeds of expectation in your mind; cultivate thoughts that anticipate achievement. Believe in yourself as being capable of overcoming all obstacles and weaknesses.
I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it’s going to rain, it will.
Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what they would have believed.
All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
But truth is hard as adamant and tender as a blossom.
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.
The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If all people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.
The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.
The day will soon come when I will show the world that the transmission of power and speech without the aid of any wires is possible.
Vision without execution is hallucination.
Let us resolve to be masters, not victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilities - always see them, for they're always there.