Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation...
It is the quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.
A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.
There is an important sense in which government is distinctive from administration. One is perpetual, the other is temporary and changeable. A man may be loyal to his government and yet oppose the particular principles and methods of administration.
We shall meanly lose or nobly save the last hope of earth.
The occasion is piled high with difficulty. We must rise to the occasion.
I will either be America’s greatest president or its last.
There is nothing true anywhere, The true is nowhere to be seen; If you say you see the true, This seeing is not the true one.
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time and will ever continue to struggle. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”
Were it not for my little jokes, I could not bear the burdens of this office.
You can not fail in any laudable object, unless you allow your mind to be improperly directed.
Again I admonish you not to be turned from your stern purpose of defending your beloved country and its free institutions by any arguments urged by ambitious and designing men, but stand fast to the Union and the old flag.
What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle – the sheet anchor of American republicanism.
We think slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the territories, where our votes will reach it.
In the first place, I insist that our fathers did not make this nation half slave and half free, or part slave and part free. I insist that they found the institution of slavery existing here. They did not make it so, but they left it so because they knew of no way to get rid of it at that time.
I think slavery is wrong, morally, 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.
I did say, at Chicago, in my speech there, that I do wish to see the spread of slavery arrested and to see it placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.
So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly selfish way; for although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.
I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.