The worst thing you can do for those you love is the things they could and should do themselves.

One's only security in life comes from doing something uncommonly well.

He will have to learn, I know, that all people are not just- that all men and women are not true. Teach him that for every scoundrel there is a hero that for every enemy there is a friend. Let him learn early that the bullies are the easiest people to lick.

[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.

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.

No State, upon it own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. Resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally nothing. I therefore consider that the Union is unbroken. There needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless forced upon the national authority.

When someone asked Abraham Lincoln, after he was elected president, what he was going to do about his enemies, he replied, "I am going to destroy them. I am going to make them my friends."