Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

When I go hear a man speak, I like to hear him speak like he's fighting a swarm of bees.

Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again.

In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man.

He [Stephen Douglas] is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them; that he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.

When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.

Government, possessing the power to create and issue currency and credit as money and enjoying the right to withdraw both currency and credit from circulation by taxation and otherwise, need not and should not borrow capital at interest as a means of financing government work and public enterprises.