The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

You must remember that some things legally right are not morally right.

If 600,000 people have to die in order for the nation to live, then 600,000 people will die.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.

Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.

Weakness is what keeps driving us to God, by the overwhelming conviction that there just isn't anywhere else to go.