If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already.

Towering genius...thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freeman.

We must ask where we are and whither we are tending.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Extemporaneous speaking should be practised [sic] and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.

Seriously, I do not think I am fit for the Presidency.

Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert? I think that in such a cse to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional but withal a great mercy.