Abraham Lincoln Quotes

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery

He who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave…

You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

It is bad to have a servant, but worse to have a master.

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.

Was not the issue this: whether mankind should be divided between those who command and those who serve; between those who use others at their will and those who must submit; whether the measure of a man's power to shape his own destiny should be the force at his disposal? Our nation was founded upon an answer to those questions, and we have fought this war to make good that answer.

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.

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.

Where is the man, who, if asked to become a slave, would not hurl back the offer indignantly in the teeth of the oppressor?

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.

It is terrible to speak of you, Liberty, for one who lives without you.

Freedom is never easily won, but once established, freedom lasts, spreads and chokes out tyranny.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

If we are not represented, we are slaves.

I would prefer to be a citizen of an independent country rather than Emperor of an enslaved one.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

Free men have arms; slaves do not.

No man is good enough to be another's master.

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

No people must be forced under a sovereignty under which it does not wish to live.

Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.