We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.

I have simply tried to do what seemed best each day, as each day came.

If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

My Dear McClellan, if you don't want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully.

Half finished work generally proves to be labor lost.

Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.