I hold the value of life is to improve one's condition. Whatever is calculated to advance the condition of the honest, struggling laboring man, so far as my judgment will enable me to judge of a correct thing, I am for that thing.

All the armies of Europe combined could not by force make a track upon the Blue Ridge, or take a drink from the Ohio. If we are to be destroyed, we must do it ourselves.

The President to-night has a dream: - He was in a party of plain people, and, as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said: - "He is a very common-looking man". The President replied: - "The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them".

The severest justice may not always be the best policy

I do not wish to be misunderstood upon this subject of slavery in this country. I suppose it may long exist, and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time. But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end.

If you have never failed you have never lived.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.