While she lived, whenever I returned to the paternal roof, I felt as if the joys and charms of childhood returned to make me happy; all was kindness and affection.

At once silent and active as the movement of the orbs of heaven, one of the links which connected me with former ages is no more.

May a merciful Providence spare for many future years my only remaining parent!

Whatever talents I possess, that of intrigue is not among them.

The only possible chance for a head of a department to attain the Presidency is by ingratiating himself with the members of Congress; and as many of them have objects of their own to obtain, the temptation is immense to corrupt coalitions…

But, of all its other difficulties, the most objectionable is that it obviously includes the engrafting a colonial establishment upon the constitution of the United States, and thereby an accession of power to the national government…

Great Britain, who had been vilifying us for twenty years as a low-minded nation, with no generous ambition, no God but gold, had now changed her tune, and was endeavoring to alarm the world at the gigantic grasp of our ambition.

Nothing we can say will remove this impression until the world shall be familiarized with the idea of considering the continent of North America to be our proper dominion.

From the time we became an independent people, it was as much a law of nature that this should become our pretension, as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea.

Its inevitable consequence is to make every administration a scene of continuous and furious electioneering for the succession to the Presidency.

The slave states are free to continue or abolish slavery.

The constitution contains no provision concerning slavery in a new state; Congress, therefore, may make it a condition of the admission of a new state that slavery shall forever be prohibited within it.

Under this self-restraint he observed that slavery, unhappily, exists in the United States; that enlightened men in the states where it is permitted, and everywhere out of them, regret its existence among us, and seek for the means of…

The equality of rights, which includes an equality of burdens, is a vital principle in our theory of government.

The effect of the constitution has been obvious in the preponderance it has given to the slave-holding states over the other states.

But the extension of this disproportionate power to the new states would be unjust and odious.

The existence of slavery impairs the industry and power of a nation.

In a country where manual labor is performed by slaves, that of freemen is dishonored.

In case of foreign war, or domestic insurrection, slaves not only do not add to, but diminish the faculty of self-defence.

If Missouri, and the states formed to the west of the River Mississippi, are permitted to introduce and establish slavery, the repose, if not the security, of the Union, may be endangered.

All the states south of the River Ohio, and west of Pennsylvania and Delaware, will be peopled with slaves; and the establishment of new states west of the River Mississippi will serve to extend slavery, instead of freedom, over that…

Never, since human sentiment and human conduct were influenced by human speech, was there a theme for eloquence like the free side of this question, now before the Congress of the Union.

By what fatality does it happen that all the most eloquent orators are on its slavish side?

There is a great mass of cool judgment and of plain sense on the side of freedom and humanity, but the ardent spirits and passions are on the side of oppression.

These have been, through life, perpetual admonitions to do nothing unworthy of it.