To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government.

Your good mother tells me you are feeling very badly in your new situation. Allow me to assure you it is a perfect certainty that you will, very soon, feel better - quite happy - if you only stick to the resolution you have taken to procure a military education.... On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was'.

It must now atone in blood for its complicity in wickedness.

Why don't I drink from a straw? Because straws are for suckers.

The Bible says somewhere that we are desperately selfish. I think we would have discovered that fact without the Bible.

His argument is as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by oiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.