"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."
"He [Stephen Douglas] is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them; that he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national."
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Source: Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Paul M. Angle (1958). “The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858”, p.311, University of Chicago Press
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