We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.

A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

You need not value it yourself if you do not wish to; but you ought to allow it to us who do value it.

Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.

I know without needing to hear the voice of the Creator that the stars trace out in space the orbits which His hand has drawn.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.