A house divided against itself cannot stand

Abraham Lincoln




For those who aren't aware of it, today is Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. Darwin has had the news, and Pelosi/Reid/Obama/Collins/Snowe/etc. The rest of the news cycle (did I forget Octomom too). Yet many of his quotes are as applicable today as they were 150 years ago. Most people missed "Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure."


It appears that we are already on the slope to destruction. Our current haste to save the economy is being performed in ignorance of the consequences of our actions. Lincoln remarked: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."


"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. "

From his Inaugural Address:"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."

And the second Inaugural Address "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.... "

In light of the dialog above, I end with my favorite quotes from Lincoln: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. " and "We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it."

For more about Abraham Lincoln, see:

http://www.lincolnbicentennial.gov/