This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.

A jury too often has at least one member more ready to hang the panel than to hang the traitor.

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.

Don't judge a man by the size of his ego or his heart, but on the epicness of his beard and the beautiful woman on his arm

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.