st men have left no
descendants to shine in the borrowed luster of a great name.

An uncertain currency, that goes up and down, hits the laborer, and hits
him hard. It helps him last and hurts him first.

We no longer attribute the untimely death of infants to the sin of Adam,
but to bad nursing and ignorance.

The granite hills are not so changeless and abiding as the restless sea.

In their struggle with the forces of nature, the ability to labor was
the richest patrimony of the colonists.

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe--human or divine. A
law is no law without coercion behind it.

For the noblest man who lives there still remains a conflict.

We hold reunions, not for the dead; for there is nothing in all the
earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and
past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give them no
immortality. They do not need us, but for ever and for evermore we need
them.

Throughout the whole web of national existence we trace the golden
thread of human progress toward a higher and better estate.

Heroes did not make our liberties, but they reflected and illustrated
them.

After all, territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit
its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life. In them dwells
its hope of immortality. Among them, if anywhere, are to be found its
chief elements of destruction.

It matters little what may be the forms of national institution if the
life, freedom, and growth of society are secured.

Finally, our great hope for the future--our great safeguard against
danger--is to be found in the general and thorough education of our
people, and in the virtue which accompanies such education.

The germ of our political institutions, the primary cell from which they
were evolved, was in the New England town, and the vital force, the
informing soul, of the town was the town meeting, which, for all local
concerns, was kings, lords, and commons in all.

It is as much the duty of all good men to protect and defend the
reputation of worthy public servants as to detect public rascals.

Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing.

If you are not too large for the place, you are too small for it.

Young men talk of trusting to the spur of the occasion. That trust is
vain. Occasions can not make spurs. If you expect to wear spurs, you
must win them. If you wish to use them, you must buckle them to