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

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.

There are no eyes so sharp as the eyes of hatred.

Misfortunes have their dignity and their redeeming power.

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

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

One might feel indignant at the injustice which deals out what is called fame with so unequal a hand, were it not for the reflection that men who are competent to add to the intellectual wealth of the world, and enlarge the domain of knowledge, have learned to take popular applause at its true value, and to find in the faithful discharge of honorable duty a satisfaction which is its own reward.