We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency - clear disinterested thinking and fearless action

Here lies, in a "horizontal" position The "outside" case of Peter Pendulum, watch-maker. He departed this life "wound up" In hopes of being "taken in hand" by his Maker, And of being thoroughly "cleaned, repaired" and "set a-going" In the world to come.

No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.

Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up.

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.

The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow-citizens . Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to the air.

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.