When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism.

Doubtless you begin to understand how disagreeable it is to me to do a thing arbitrarily, when it is unsatisfactory to others associated with me.

We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it. Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known.

[T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Prosperity is the fruit of labor. It begins with saving money.

You know you've reached middle age when all you exercise is caution