I shall not do more than I can, and I shall do all I can to save the government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination. I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.
I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world, by thus fostering Human Slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of Human Freedom.
Labor is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human comforts and necessities are drawn.
Half finished work generally proves to be labor lost.
The working men are the basis of all governments, for the plain reason that they are the most numerous...
Law is nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind.
If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.
In law it is good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you can not.
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.
I can make a General in five minutes but a good horse is hard to replace.
There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of government policy, is an inseparable compound of the two, so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.
It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.
It has been said of the world’s history hitherto that might makes right. It is for us and for our time to reverse the maxim, and to say that right makes might.
The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.
I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
One company can serve some of your needs all of the time, or all of your needs some of the time, but never both.
I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that “it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.”
It has long been recognized that the problems with alcohol relate not to the use of a bad thing, but to the abuse of a good thing.