Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in bonds of fraternal feeling.

Some single mind must be master, else there will be no agreement in anything.

In all that people can do for themselves, government ought not to interfere.

No client ever had money enough to bribe my conscience or to stop its utterance against wrong, and oppression. My conscience is my own - my creators - not man's. I shall never sink the rights of mankind to the malice, wrong, or avarice of another's wishes, though those wishes come to me in the relation of client and attorney.

Young man, if God gives me four years more to rule this country, I believe it will become what it ought to be-what its Divine Author intended it to be-no longer one vast plantation for breeding human beings for the purpose of lust and bondage. But it will become a new Valley of Jehoshaphat, where all the nations of the earth will assemble together under one flag, worshipping a common God, and they will celebrate the resurrection of human freedom.

War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.