Every character is the joint product of nature and nurture.
It has been fortunate that most of our greatest 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.