10000+ Motivational and Inspiring Quotes About Life, Love & Success

I have always been an old

line Henry Clay Whig.

If I like a thing,

it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

I have said a hundred times,

and I have no inclination to take it back,

that I believe there is no right,

and ought to be no inclination in the people

of the free States to enter into the slave States,

and to interfere with the question of slavery at all.

I have said that always.

I was born and have ever remained in

the most humble walks of life.

Being elected to Congress,

though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it,

has not pleased me as much as I expected.

Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent

upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil

and in the proportionable amount of the same

which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.

In so far as the government lands can be disposed of,

I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels so

that every poor man may have a home.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it

and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief

that it is in course of ultimate extinction,

or its advocates will push it forward,

till it shall become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new

North as well as South.

I can express all my views on the slavery question

by quotations from Henry Clay.

That our government should have been maintained in its original

form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at.

It had many props to support it through that period,

which now are decayed and crumbled away.

Through that period,

it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now,

it is understood to be a successful one.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by

all and thought to include all; but now,

to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal,

it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till,

if its framers could rise from their graves,

they could not at all recognize it.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature

opposition to it is his love of justice.

These principles are an eternal antagonism;

and when brought into collision so fiercely,

as slavery extension brings them,

shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana,

in my eighth year... It was a wild region,

with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.

There I grew up... Of course when I came of age,

I did not know much.

Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher...

but that was all.

The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim

their fugitives I have constantly admitted.

The legal right of Congress to interfere with

their institution in the states,

I have constantly denied.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain

that this nation, under God,

shall have a new birth of freedom

and that government of the people,

by the people, for the people,

shall not perish from the earth.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought

forth on this continent, a new nation,

conceived in Liberty,

and dedicated to the proposition that

all men are created equal.

The people know their rights,

and they are never slow to assert

and maintain them when they are invaded.

Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine,

should any ever do so,

it is my intention to do all in my power to

make her happy and contented;

and there is nothing I can imagine that would

make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort.

The highest art is always the most religious,

and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery,

I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.