I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct, nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

The citizen who sees his society's democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.

Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.