The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States.
My agency in promoting the passage of the National Banking Act was the greatest mistake of my life. It has built up a monopoly which affects every interest in the country.
True Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of nativity. Wherever it sees a man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights.
How wrong it is for those who love, not to express their love.
States Rights died at Appomattox.
No more slave States and no more slave territory.
The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property.
No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense. The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins.
Once I should have been, if not satisfied, partially, at least, contented with suffrage for the intelligent and those who have been soldiers; now I am convinced that universal suffrage is demanded by sound policy and impartial justice.
I never refused my help to any person black or white; and I liked the office nonetheless because there were neither fees nor salary connected with it.
What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?
The way to resumption is to resume.
All men are born equally free.
A resignation is a grave act; never performed by a right minded man without forethought or with reserve.
What a vale of misery this world is! To me it has been emphatically so. Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five. My path has been – how terribly true it is – through the region of his shadow. Sometimes I feel as if I could give up – as if I must give up. And then after all I rise and press on.