Abraham Lincoln Quotes About Tyranny

• As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Country, Freedom, Taken

  Letter to Joshua F. Speed, 24 Aug. 1855

• We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny.

  Abraham Lincoln

  War, Party, Mean

  Abraham Lincoln (2012). “The Complete Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln (Biographically Annotated Edition)”, p.1338, Jazzybee Verlag

• It is my pleasure that my children are free and happy, and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Children, Father, Parenting

  Abraham Lincoln, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (1950). “The Lincoln treasury”

• It is not our frowning battlements...or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land... Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Army, Men, Land

  "Lincoln on Democracy" by Abraham Lincoln, G. S. Boritt, Fordham University Press, (p. 128), September 1, 2004.

• When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Men, Self, White Man

  Address on the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, delivered 16 October 1854, Peoria, Illinois

• [T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Block, Struggle, Men

• Its authors meant it to be... a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Block, Nuts, Land

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln(1832-1865) (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition)”, p.139, ReadHowYouWant.com

You May Also Like:

George Washington

John F. Kennedy

John Wilkes Booth

Theodore Roosevelt

Thomas Jefferson

Mary Todd Lincoln

Barack Obama