What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

It was the most earnest ambition I ever had....Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but the fly comes close.

Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the state die? Oh, no.

All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.