It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

The path of nature is, indeed, a narrow one, and it is only the immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves cramped therein.

A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.

New occasions teach new duties.

Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance, Begotten by the slaves they trample on.