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

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to

make anything out of my early life.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it

and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief

that it is in course of ultimate extinction,

or its advocates will push it forward,

till it shall become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new

North as well as South.

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance

with the will of God.

Both may be, and one must be wrong.

To give victory to the right,

not bloody bullets,

but peaceful ballots only,

are necessary.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by

all and thought to include all; but now,

to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal,

it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till,

if its framers could rise from their graves,

they could not at all recognize it.

I believe this government cannot endure permanently,

half slave and half free.

We can succeed only by concert.

It is not,

'Can any of us imagine better,' but,

'Can we all do better?'

I was losing interest in politics,

when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.

What I have done since then is pretty well known.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored,

and others have, without labor,

enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

I understand a ship to be made for the carrying

and preservation of the cargo,

and so long as the ship can be saved, with the cargo,

it should never be abandoned.

This Union likewise should never be abandoned unless

it fails and the possibility of its preservation shall cease to exist,

without throwing passengers and cargo overboard.

It was that which gave promise that in due time

the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men,

and that all should have an equal chance.

This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house,

that he can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.

The people themselves,

and not their servants,

can safely reverse their own deliberate decisions.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.

In my view of the present aspect of affairs,

there is no need of bloodshed and war.

There is no necessity for it.

I am not in favor of such a course,

and I may say in advance,

there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the government.

The government will not use force unless force is used against it.

The point the power to hurt

of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

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.

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

but to break up both and make new ones.