Historic Quotes relating to American Treasures

Historical Quotes

On America

From Abraham Lincoln

The Spiritual Roots of America

The Price paid for Freedom

Abraham Lincoln

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness."

April 30, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln’s

Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not…the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army… Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms."

From a speech at Edwardsville,

Illinois Sept 11, 1856

"Intelligence, patriotism… and a firm reliance on Him who has never forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty."

--Lincoln’s First Inaugural address

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves, No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail, The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."

--Abraham Lincoln December 1, 1862

Annual message to Congress

"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 bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace."

-- Lincoln’s second inaugural address

March 4, 1885

"It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord."

--Abraham Lincoln