Henry Cabot Lodge: “Even admitting the truth of this, a real love of honest fun and of a hearty laugh is a kindly quality that all men like.”

The historian and the biographer may fail to do him justice, but the instinct of mankind will not fail.

It was a difficult thing for men who had been born colonists to rise to a sense of national opportunities, but Washington passed at a single step from being a Virginian to being an American, and in so doing he stood alone.

The vulgar hatred of wealth found no place in his heart.

He repeatedly referred to the United States, even before the close of the war, as an infant empire, and he saw before any one else the destined growth of the country.