The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today.

Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.

A land without memories is a people without liberty.

Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans.

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

I believe it to be the duty of everyone to unite in the restoration of the country and the reestablishment of peace and harmony.

The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.

In all my perplexities and distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light and strength.

Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.

You hear me, don't ever let anyone kill the spark inside you. No matter what.

If the shoe doesn't fit - break it!

The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is who find the least fault.

Make sure it is not too diverse or spread out so people don't know where to go or what to do. So keep a sharp focus. It can be ambitious but should have a small agenda.

You have to want to have taste. Some people have inherently bad taste. Their problem is really not the bad taste -- that can be fixed -- but that they don't know they have it!

Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.

Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.

My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.

Here's what my love affair with quotations has taught me: the more you focus on words that uplift you, the more you embody the ideas contained in those words.