“Auxiliary to all this, and working hand in hand with it, the Nebraska doctrine, or what is left of it, is to educate and mold public opinion, at least Northern public opinion, not to care whether slavery is voted down or voted up. This shows exactly where we now are; and partially, also, whither we are tending.
It will throw additional light on the latter, to go back, and run the mind over the string of historical facts already stated. Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring. The people were to be left "perfectly free," subject only to the Constitution. What the Constitution had to do with it, outsiders could not then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted niche, for the Dred Scott decision to afterward come in, and declare the perfect free freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all. Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the people, voted down? Plainly enough now: the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision.”
1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)
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Abraham Lincoln 618
16th President of the United States 1809–1865Related quotes

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Advertisement, N.Y. Herald Tribune (August 19, 1946)

“That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.”
"Universities, Actual and Ideal" (1874) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE3/U-Ac-I.html
1870s

Letter to his mother, Sophia Birchard Hayes (27 January 1849)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

Or, selon mon advis, entre toutes les seigneuries du monde, dont j'ay connoissance, où la chose publique est mieux traictée, et où règne moins de violence sur le peuple, et où il n'y a nuls édifices abatus, ni démolis pour guerre, c'est Angleterre; et tombe le sort et le malheur sur ceux qui font la guerre.
Bk. V, ch. 19.
Mémoires
Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 18. (12. The composition of the Bhagavadgītā)