The whole fabric of southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic.

I don’t hold with equality in all things only with equality before the law and nothing more.

No government can be free that does not allow all its citizens to participate in the formation and execution of her laws.

I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom.

The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.

The freedom of a government does not depend on the quality of its laws, but upon the power that has the right to create them.

I wish the Indians had newspapers of their own. If they had, you would have horrible pictures of the cold-blooded murders of inoffensive Indians.

Retain, even in opposition, your capacity for astonishment.

I answer, because I live among men and not among angels.

There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion; in the bloody religions of the heathen.

The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conquerer.

I am surprised nothing has been made of the fact that astronaut Neil Armstrong carried no sidearms when he landed on the moon.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again?

Exaggeration is a branch of lying.

Either grant me the bliss of the ignorant or give me the strength to bear the knowledge.

The lecturer who is full of his subject is usually very slow in emptying himself.

My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.

It was on the cross of Calvary that God, in Christ, dealt fully and finally with self, the nature from which all our sins flow.

I'm regarded as the patron saint of manicurists.