A Quote by Abraham Lincoln

'A living dog is better than a dead lion.' Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don't care anything about it.

Abraham Lincoln

Quote Topics

About Advances Anything Better Caged Care Dead Dog Don't Care Douglas How Judge Least Lion Living Oppose Slavery Than Toothless Work

Quote Author

Abraham Lincoln
American - President
February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865

We have got to defeat this attack on the freedom of the mind...But it takes courage for a young man with a family to stand up to it; all the more obligation on those of us who have nothing left to lose. At any age it is better to be a dead lion than a living dog - though better still, of course, to be a living and victorious lion - but it is easier to run the risk of being killed (or fired) in action if before long you are going to be dead anyway. This freedom seems to me the chief consolation of old age.

Elmer Davis

He who does not understand that a dead lion is more alive than a living dog will remain a dog.

Maimonides

It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.

Robert A. Heinlein

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.

C. S. Lewis

The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or eventhe Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Henry David Thoreau

The lion doesn't care that the sheep laugh at him. Remember that. The lion just stays there. The animals make noise and tease. The guy with the belt is the lion.

B. J. Penn

Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.

C. S. Lewis

There was something dead in my heart. I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse. I had a dead mouse in my heart.

Richard Brautigan

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.