Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.

There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.

Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.

Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.

The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.