Popular Quotes Through Time

Douglas is playing cuttlefish, a small species of fish that has no mode of defending itself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid, which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it.

There is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases.

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

We have enough objects of charity at home, and it is our duty to take care of our own poor, and our own suffering, before we go abroad to intermeddle with other people's business.

Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to Death ?

I think the negro is included in the word 'men' used in the Declaration of Independence.

Just think of such a sucker as me as President!

The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred, defeats.

Though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.

I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way.

Is he [youth] not the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future?

The inclination to exchange thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature.

Writing ... is the great invention of the world.

Stand by your principles; stand by your guns; and victory complete and permanent is sure at the last.

I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency.

Of course I would have preferred success; but failing in that, I have no regrets for having rejected all advice to the contrary, and resolutely made the struggle.

I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.

Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.

No party can command respect which sustains this year, what it opposed last.

I have found that when one is embarrassed, usually the shortest way to get through with it is to quit talking or thinking about it, and go at something else.