Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, the self-educated prairie lawyer who led the Union through the Civil War, abolished slavery, and set the terms on which the nation would be put back together. He held office for barely four years, all of them wartime, and in that span he produced the finest political prose in American history: the Gettysburg Address, the two Inaugurals, and a body of letters and speeches studied by presidents ever since. He is the standing American example of what disciplined study, persuasion, and magnanimity can do under maximum pressure.
He was born in a Kentucky log cabin, moved with his family to Indiana and then to Illinois, and picked up what education he could between farm work: by his own account, the whole of his formal schooling did not add up to a year. He read borrowed books by firelight, talked his way into New Salem society, and resolved to make himself a lawyer. He borrowed Blackstone’s Commentaries, walked twenty miles to borrow more books, and, to teach himself what it meant to prove a thing, worked through the first six books of Euclid while riding the judicial circuit. Admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836, he built a successful Springfield practice, in partnership with William H. Herndon from 1844 until he left for Washington. In politics he served four terms as a Whig in the Illinois legislature and one term in the U.S. House (1847–49). The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which reopened the expansion of slavery, pulled him back into politics, and his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas made him a national figure. His Cooper Union address in February 1860 finished the ascent; that November he was elected president.
Seven states had left the Union before he took the oath in March 1861, and the war began weeks later. Lincoln learned generalship on the job, cycling through commanders until he found Ulysses S. Grant, and learned war finance, conscription, and the management of a fractious cabinet at the same time. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, turning the war into a war on slavery; that November he dedicated the cemetery at Gettysburg in ten sentences. Re-elected in 1864, he used his Second Inaugural to frame the peace as moral reckoning without vengeance: malice toward none, charity for all. Five days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, on April 14, 1865, he was shot at Ford’s Theatre and died the next morning.
What he left behind is unusual among statesmen: the best evidence of his mind is his own writing, and it rewards reading as closely as any founder’s. He built speeches the way he built legal arguments, fact first, inference drawn, conclusion dared, and he revised obsessively until not a word was wasted. The politician whose formal schooling totaled a year became the writer his successors measure themselves against, which is why his profile belongs on this site: he made himself, deliberately, and then spent that self holding a country together.
Core Ideas
- The Union is an idea, not just a territory: For Lincoln the Union was democracy’s working proof that a people could govern themselves. Losing it would not just shrink a map; it would disprove the experiment itself.
- Public sentiment is everything: Laws and decisions fail without the settled opinion of the people behind them. The real work of leadership is moulding that sentiment honestly, before the crisis arrives.
- Right makes might: Moral clarity stated plainly, and repeated, is a source of power. Lincoln’s antislavery case worked because it rested on the Declaration’s own premise: all men are created equal.
- Think anew: The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. Lincoln changed instruments as the war changed, emancipation among them, and asked the country to rise with the occasion.
- Malice toward none: Victory was to be sealed with magnanimity, not vengeance: bind up the nation’s wounds. His leniency was not softness; it was the strategy for making one people again.
Abraham Lincoln Quotes
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”
— “House Divided” Speech, Springfield, June 16, 1858
“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”
— First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, August 21, 1858
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”
— Fragment on democracy, 1858
“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
— Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”
— First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
— Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862
“That government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
— Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
“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.”
— Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
“If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.”
Abraham Lincoln Books
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin) — How Lincoln brought the rivals who had beaten him for the nomination into his cabinet and managed them into a team. The most readable study of his political method.
Lincoln (David Herbert Donald) — The standard one-volume scholarly biography: Lincoln seen through the politics of his time, by the dean of Lincoln historians. The safest single life to start with.
With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Stephen B. Oates) — The one-volume life praised for narrative pace: strong on Lincoln’s growth from prairie lawyer to war president.
Browse all 13 Abraham Lincoln quotes in the Quote Library.
