When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism.

What I want is to get done what the people desire to have done, and the question for me is how to find that out exactly.

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.

I never did ask more, nor ever was willing to accept less, than for all the States, and the people thereof, to take and hold their places, and their rights, in the Union, under the Constitution of the United States. For this alone have I felt authorized to struggle; and I seek neither more nor less now.

That everyone may receive at least a moderate education appears to be an objective of vital importance.

Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.

Senator [Stephen] Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.