Quotation by Abraham Lincoln:

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln     (more by this author)

1809-1865 (Age at death: 56 approx.)

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865) served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led the country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union, ending slavery, and rededicating the nation to nationalism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, he was mostly self-educated and became a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives, but failed in two attempts at a seat in the United States Senate. He was an affectionate, though often absent, husband, and father of four children.

As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the first Republican nomination and was elected president in 1860. As president he concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war effort, always seeking to reunify the nation after the secession of the eleven Confederate States of America. He vigorously exercised unprecedented war powers, including the arrest and detention, without trial, of thousands of suspected secessionists. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and promoted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery. Six days after the surrender of the main Confederate forces, Lincoln was assassinated, the first President to suffer such a fate.

Author Information from Wikipedia

Country: United States

Type: Prose
Context: Speech
Context Details: 1850 campaign speech to workingmen of the north
Source: Internet
Uttered: 1850