If the blessings of our political and social condition have not been too highly estimated, we cannot well overrate the responsibility and duty which they impose upon us. We hold these institutions of government, religion, and learning, to be transmitted, as well as enjoyed. We are in the line of conveyance, through which whatever has been obtained by the spirit and efforts of our ancestors is to be communicated to our children.

Liberty consists in wholesome restraint

We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land - nor, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. That chart is the Constitution.

Let our object be - our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument - not of oppression and terror, but of wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever.

Those who do not look upon themselves as a link, connecting the past with the future, do not perform their duty to the world.

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.