Everybody appreciates a compliment.

I failed, I failed, and that is about all that can be said about it.

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.

[I]f the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting, the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their Government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.

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.

Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice.