You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.

In some things, we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence.

To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.

Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty.

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.