There are men who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate - that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future - and that freedom is an ebbing tide. But we Americans know that this is not true.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think ... to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

God gave man a mouth to receive bread, hands to feed it, and his hand has a right to carry bread to his mouth without controversy.

Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

I think that if anything can be proved by natural theology, it is that slavery is morally wrong.