No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

My Dear McClellan, if you don't want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully.

A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be.

Military necessity does not admit of cruelty - that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, . . . nor of torture to extort confessions.

You can not fail in any laudable object, unless you allow your mind to be improperly directed.

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.

I affect no contempt for the high eminence he [Senator Stephen Douglas] has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species,might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow.