From Connecticut to the Mississippi River, from Lake Erie to New Orleans, the craze for irresponsible banking spread like a contagious fever.

Like a dropsical man calling out for water, water, our deluded citizens are clamoring for more banks....

Never did common honesty, good faith, and fair dealing need such a stabilizing power as at the moment Marshall furnished to the American people.

The money power was responsible for the misery of the people.

This court can be insensible neither to the magnitude nor delicacy of this question.

The whole philosophy of corporations is expounded with clearness, power, and learning.

But the wiser Marshall saw in the case, as presented to the Supreme Court on the contract guarantee of the Constitution, the occasion to declare, in effect, that these same fundamental principles are embraced in the contract clause of the…

In my judgment it is supported by the principles of our constitutions, and of all free governments, as well as by the authority of adjudged cases.

If there is any book capable of arousing the people, it is the one before us.

Like the laws of the Medes and Persians, they live forever, and operate through all time." What shall be done?

The possibilities of transportation by steam railways soon became a subject of discussion by enterprising men, and Marshall's opinion gave them tremendous encouragement.

Commerce among the States is within the exclusive control of the National Government, including that which, though apparently confined to State traffic, affects the business transactions of the Nation at large.

The only supervision that may be exercised by a State over trade must be wholly confined to that State, absolutely without any connection whatever with intercourse with other States.

Sheer human nature, wearied of strife, sought the escape that mutual accommodation alone afforded.

The last words Marshall ever uttered as Chief Justice sparkle with vitality and high ideals.

What a gloom will spread over the nation when he is gone!

The social ideal had hardly begun to sprout; and nourishment for its feeble and languishing seed was sucked by its overgrown rival.

Generally speaking and aside from statesmen, merchants, and the veterans of the Revolution, the idea of a National Government had not penetrated the minds of the people.

It serves not only to illuminate the period of the beginning of our Government, but to measure the vast progress during the century and a quarter since that time.

Drunkenness is the prevailing vice, and with few exceptions, the source of all other evils.

A spirit, or rather a habit, of equality is diffused among this people as far as it possibly can go....

Scores of thousands interpreted the meaning and philosophy of this immortal paper by the light of a few flashing sentences with which it began.

Was it not the favored of the earth that government protected?

What did the poor and needy get from government except oppression and the privilege of dying for the boon?

Our children see this and learn to imitate it....