Abraham Lincoln Friendship Quotations

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end... I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.

President Lincoln was once criticized for his attitude toward his enemies. "Why do you try to make friends of them?" asked an associate. "You should try to destroy them." "Am I not destroying my enemies," Lincoln gently replied, "when I make them my friends?"

The loss of enemies does not compensate for the loss of friends.

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall. So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey which catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the highroad to his reason.

If frienship is your weakest point then you are the strongest person in the world.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

I'm a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down.

The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.

When I got him out he was near froze solid and shivering. He was shaking so hard that I wasted half a glass of whiskey trying to aim it for his mouth. Must have got enough of it into him, though, since it did seem to bring him back to life.

When someone asked Abraham Lincoln, after he was elected president, what he was going to do about his enemies, he replied, "I am going to destroy them. I am going to make them my friends."