The quote database

As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed.

Every struggle is a victory.

Life is a fair field, and the right will prosper if we stand by our guns.

To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life.

If citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.

There is no short road to the realization of these aspirations.

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press

It is a well-established principle of law that every wrong has a remedy.

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

Let all our people, leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union win the grander victories of peace.

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.

Cease your complaining and fretting; none of these things which you blame are the cause of your poverty; the cause is within yourself, and where the cause is, there is the remedy.

To be swayed by your fluctuating thoughts and impulses is to be weak and powerless; to rightly control and direct those forces is to be strong and powerful.

Do not then vainly imagine that you can obtain the heavenly possessions without making an effort.

Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.

Give scrupulous attention to the duty of the present moment.

Idleness and a strong will cannot go together, and procrastination is a total barrier to the acquisition of purposeful action.

To be able to do a thing, you must begin to do it, and keep on doing it until the thing is mastered.

Our diplomacy should be direct and frank, neither seeking to obtain more nor accepting less than is our due.

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

National honor is national property of the highest value.

If errors have been committed they ought to be corrected; if the policy is sound it ought to be supported.

the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

The most serious effect upon the poor comes when dependence upon the charitable society is substituted for the natural outgoing of human love and sympathy, which, happily, we all possess in some degree.

The right to dissent peaceably, within the guardrails of our Republic, is perhaps our nation's greatest strength.