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.
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I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).
Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.
I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.
'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.
Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the people to exclude slavery, voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.
It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.
I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.
If the people of Utah shall peacefully form a State Constitution tolerating polygamy, will the Democracy admit them into the Union?
Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder.
Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil and in the proportionable amount of the same which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.
My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families - second families, perhaps I should say.
It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.
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.
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 have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig.
No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.
It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in that we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.
In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.
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.
These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have.
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
He who molds the public sentiment... makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.
With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.
