If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.

Now what is Judge Douglas Popular Sovereignty? It is, as a principle, no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.

I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is, but it does not admit of holidays.

Our political problem now is, "Can we as a nation continue together permanently - forever - half slave and half free?"

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

We must settle this question now -- whether in a free government the minority have the right to break it up whenever they choose. If we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.

[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.