“No church is a fit temple of God where a man, because of his color, is excluded or made to occupy a corner. Religion teaches that we cannot be pleasing to God unless we look upon mankind as children of our Father in heaven. And they who order and compel a man because he is colored to betake himself to a corner marked off for his race, practically contradict the principles of justice and of equal rights established by the God of Mercy, who lives on the altar.”

NOW interview (2002)
Context: Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Qur'an praises all the great prophets of the past. That Mohammed didn't believe he had come to found a new religion to which everybody had to convert, but he was just the prophet sent to the Arabs, who hadn't had a prophet before, and left out of the divine plan. There's a story where Mohammed makes a sacred flight from Mecca to Jerusalem, to the Temple Mount. And there he is greeted by all the great prophets of the past. And he ascends to the divine throne, speaking to the prophets like Jesus and Aaron, Moses, he takes advice from Moses, and finally encounters Abraham at the threshold of the divine sphere. This story of the flight of Mohammed and the ascent to the divine throne is the paradigm, the archetype of Muslim spirituality. It reflects the ascent that every Muslim must make to God and the Sufis... the mystical branch of Islam, the Sufi movement, insisted that when you had encountered God, you were neither a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim. You were at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple or a church, because all rightly guided religion comes from God, and a man of God, once he's glimpsed the divine, has left these man-made distinctions behind.

The Wisdom of Man (1980)

1960s, The American Promise (1965)

Sermon at St. Augustine Catholic Church (1890)

If we build strong and long, we must build upon moral principle.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997)
In Concert

The Highest of the High (1953)

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)
Context: A white man's government? Well, I am a white man, I believe. Will anybody undertake to teach me what are the antipathies and loathings of white men? What mean whites may or may not like is of small importance. But the generous soul of my race, which has led the van in the great march of liberty and civilization, and whose lofty path is marked by the broken chains of every form of slavery, has an instinctive hatred of injustice, of exclusive privilege, of arrogance, ignorance, and baseness, and an instinctive love of honor, magnanimity and justice. The white soul of my race naturally loves the man, of whatever race or color, who bravely fights and gloriously dies for equal rights, and instinctively loathes every man who, saved by the blood of such heroes, deems himself made of choicer clay. The spirit of caste asks us to believe the outraged race inferior. Inferior? Inferior in what? In sagacity? In fidelity? In nobility of soul? In the prime qualities of manhood? And who are asked to believe this? We? We, hot, panting, exhausted from a fight for our national life in a part of the country where every white face was probably that of an enemy, and every colored face was surely that of a friend. We are asked to say it, whose brothers and sons, escaping from horrible pens of torture and death hundreds of miles from our lines, made their way through swamps and forests, safe from hungry bloodhounds and fiercer men, back to our homes and hearts, only because the men whom in our triumphant fortune we are asked to betray, in our darkest hour of misfortune risked their lives to save ours.

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA177 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 177
1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)