When I lay down the reins of this administration, I want to have one friend left. And that friend is myself.

Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.

The people when rightly and fully trusted will return the trust.

Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)

My old father used to have a saying: If you make a bad bargain, hug it all the tighter.

Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.

[I]f the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting, the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their Government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.