Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

I believe this Government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

It is easiest to "be all things to all men," but it is not honest. Self-respect must be sacrificed every hour in the day.

But for that Book, we could not know right from wrong.

Relying, as I do, upon the Almighty Power, and encouraged as I am by these resolutions which you have just read, with the support which I receive from Christian men, I shall not hesitate to use all the means at my control to secure the termination of this rebellion, and will hope for success.

I cannot imagine anyone looking at the sky and denying God.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.