10000+ Motivational and Inspiring Quotes About Life, Love & Success

The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim

their fugitives I have constantly admitted.

The legal right of Congress to interfere with

their institution in the states,

I have constantly denied.

Some single mind must be master,

else there will be no agreement in anything.

The point the power to hurt

of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

I should like to know if,

taking this old Declaration of Independence,

which declares that all men are equal upon principle,

you begin making exceptions to it,

where will you stop?

If one man says it does not mean a Negro,

why not another say it does not mean some other man?

I perhaps ought to say that individually

I never was much interested in the Texas question.

I never could see much good to come of annexation,

inasmuch as they were already

a free republican people on our own model.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana

is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl;

we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg

than by smashing it.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion

can be permanently maintained.

He who molds the public sentiment...

makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.

I am rather inclined to silence.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws,

but to break up both and make new ones.

As our case is new,

we must think and act anew.

I have talked with great men,

and I do not see how they differ from others.

I never went to school more than six months in my life,

but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections,

I remember how,

when a mere child,

I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me

in a way I could not understand.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain

that this nation, under God,

shall have a new birth of freedom

and that government of the people,

by the people, for the people,

shall not perish from the earth.

A man watches his pear tree day after day,

impatient for the ripening of the fruit.

Let him attempt to force the process,

and he may spoil both fruit and tree.

But let him patiently wait,

and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

I think that slavery is wrong, morally,

socially and politically.

I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States,

and I should not object if it should gradually

terminate in the whole Union.

Biographies,

as generally written,

are not only misleading but false...

In most instances,

they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought

forth on this continent, a new nation,

conceived in Liberty,

and dedicated to the proposition that

all men are created equal.

If I were to try to read,

much less answer,

all the attacks made on me,

this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it

not for themselves and, under a just God,

cannot long retain it.