If any of my men kill prisoners, I'll kill them.

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.

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

The bold enterprises are the successful ones. Take counsel of hopes rather than of fears to win in this business.

I have the greatest aversion to being a candidate on a ticket with a man whose record as an upright public man is to be in question--to be defended from the beginning to the end.

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.

One thing you may be sure of, I was not a party to covering up anything.