Happy Birthday, Abe Lincoln

Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, is considered by many people to be one of the greatest Presidents the U.S. has had.

In observance of this celebration, a recreation of a debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas was recently held at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, CT. To access a Norwich Bulletin article on this recreation, please visit:

Norwich Bulletin: Lincoln, Douglas fire up Norwich crowd (11 FEB 12)

For the official White House biography of Abraham Lincoln, please visit:

The White House: Abraham Lincoln

For a chronology of Abraham Lincoln's life, please visit:

Northern Illinois University Libraries: Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project: Abraham Lincoln Chronology

For a series of pictures of Abraham Lincoln, please visit:

Fox News: Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States

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A selection of quotes from Abraham Lincoln:

"A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones." (from an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, 30 September 1859)

"The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated - quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive." (from an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, 30 September 1859)

"Every man is proud of what he does well; and no man is proud of what he does not do well. With the former, his heart is in his work; and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue. The latter performs a little imperfectly, looks at it in disgust, turns from it, and imagines himself exceedingly tired. The little he has done, comes to nothing, for want of finishing." (from an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, 30 September 1859)

"When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a "drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall." (from an address given to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society. 22 February 1842)

"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; 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 lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." (from his Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865)