From time to time, little men will find fault with what you have done...but they will go down the stream like bubbles, they will vanish. But the work you have done will remain for the ages.

What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does.

The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

It was a pleasure to deal with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything mean and base, and who possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body and mind, for the lack of which no merely negative virtue can ever atone.

The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack.