Wealth brings noble opportunities, and competence is a proper object of pursuit; but wealth, and even competence, may be bought at too high a price. Wealth itself has no moral attribute. It is not money, but the love of money, which is the root of all evil. It is the relation between wealth and the mind and the character of its possessor which is the essential thing.

If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people.

Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician.

Ambition is not a weakness unless it be disproportioned to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to be at once weak and unhappy.