Now I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil.

I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.

Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

[T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

The president is the cube of ice one places in the pot of a houseplant, providing a steady amount of nourishment over the course of a hot day. A good description of the job and also a fantastic bit of practical household advice.

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honour or dishonour, to the last generation. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, our last best hope of Earth.