A sure sign of an amateur is too much detail to compensate for too little life.

When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.

I lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps) when I was a lad and even now my thought goes back for refreshment to thosedays when all the world seemed to be a place of heroic adventure in which one's heart must keep its own counsel.

If you wish your children to be Christians you must really take the trouble to be Christian yourselves. Those are the only terms upon which the home will work the gracious miracle.

Has justice ever grown in the soil of absolute power? Has not justice always come from the ... heart and spirit of men who resist power?

It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their indepdence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery...and the world, it might be hoped, would see it as a moral war, not a political; and the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not for the South.

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.