If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.
A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
The people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.
Faith puts God between us and our circumstances.
There is always room at the top.
The law: it has honored us; may we honor it.
Let it be borne on the flag under which we rally in every exigency, that we have one country, one constitution, one destiny.
The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good, and difficult for them to do evil.
The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.
If all my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would soon regain all the rest.
The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions.
Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.
The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.
When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood.
I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston and Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever.
If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.