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.

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

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.

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow.

We have erased segregation in those areas of national life to which Federal authority clearly extends. So doing in this, my friends, we have neither sought nor claimed partisan credit, and all such actions are nothing more - nothing less than the rendering of justice.