Do you think that the nature of man will be changed; that the same causes that produced agitation at one time will not have the same effect at another?

I maintain that when he says, after the Supreme Court has decided the question, that the people may yet exclude slavery by any means whatever, he does virtually say that it is not a question for the Supreme Court.

I hold that the proposition that slavery cannot enter a new country without police regulations is historically false.

It takes not only law, but the enforcement of law to keep it out.

There can be nothing in the words "support the Constitution," if you may run counter to it by refusing support to any right established under the Constitution.

If I wished to refuse to give legislative support to slave property in the Territories, if a member of Congress, I could not do it, holding the view that the Constitution establishes that right.

And, although it is distasteful to me, I have sworn to support the Constitution; and, having so sworn, I cannot conceive that I do support it if I withhold from that right any necessary legislation to make it practical.

A member of Congress swears to support the Constitution of the United States, and if he sees a right established by that Constitution which needs specific legislative protection, can he clear his oath without giving that protection?

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

And I say here to you, if any one expects of me in the case of my election, that I will do anything not signified by our Republican platform and my answers here to-day, I tell you very frankly, that person will be deceived.

If I should never be elected to any office, I trust I may go down with no stain of falsehood upon my reputation, notwithstanding the hard opinions Judge Douglas chooses to entertain of me.

I do not ask for the vote of any one who supposes that I have secret purposes or pledges that I dare not speak out....

But I must say, in all fairness to him, if he thinks I am doing something which leads to these bad results, it is none the better that I did not mean it.

A man cannot prove a negative, but he has a right to claim that when a man makes an affirmative charge, he must offer some proof to show the truth of what he says.

I certainly cannot introduce testimony to show the negative about things, but I have a right to claim that if a man says he knows a thing, then he must show how he knows it.

Anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

I have never said anything to the contrary; but I hold, that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence,--the right to…

I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.

But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of any living man.

They do not make "a house divided against itself," but they make a house united.

If they produce in one section of the country what is called for by the wants of another section, and this other section can supply the wants of the first, they are not matters of discord, but bonds of union, true bonds of union.

I leave it for you to say, whether in the history of our government, this institution of slavery has not always failed to be a bond of union, and, on the contrary, been an apple of discord and an element of division in the house.

Now, I believe if we could arrest the spread, and place it where Washington and Jefferson and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind would, as for eighty years past, believe that it was in…

It is just as fatal to the country, if I have any influence in producing it, whether I intend it or not.