The study of tools as well as of books should have a place in the public schools. Tools, machinery, and the implements of the farmshould be made familiar to every boy, and suitable industrial education should be furnished for every girl.

Nothing brings out the lower traits of human nature like office-seeking. Men of good character and impulses are betrayed by it into all sorts of meanness.

General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property.

I am succeeding very well so far with my legging, but it is a very mean business for a man that has been well brought up to engage in. It is the only way to get a bill from Cincinnati through, so it must be done.

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey.

Let every man, every corporation, and especially let every village, town, and city, every county and State, get out of debt and keep out of debt. It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.

It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.