Henry Watterson

It is love—love through grace of God—truth where we can find it—which shall irradiate the life that is.

O Liberty,” cried Madame Roland, “how many crimes are committed in thy name!” “O Churchism,” may I not say, “how much nonsense is trolled off in thy name!

Too many churches—or, shall I say, church fabrics—breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy.

Socialism, disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the ensuing “dark ages,” like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece…

With a kind of education—most men taught to read, very few to think—the masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves.

Yet it is after all a figure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of duty without necessarily engaging our affection.

In short he was an opportunist void of conviction and indifferent to consistency.

From fakers who have cards up their sleeves, not to mention snakes in their boots, we hear a great deal about “the people,” pronounced by them as if it were spelled “pee-pul.” It is the unfailing recourse of the professional politician in…

Religion’s the only game whar you can’t lose.

We should say to Europe: “Shinny on your own side of the water and we will shinny on our side.” It may be that Napoleon’s opinion will come true that ultimately Europe will be “all Cossack or all republican.” Part of it has come true…

But he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeley was, and there is nothing but sentiment—gush and gammon—in the proposed League of Nations.

Too many of us—the President among the rest, I fear—miscalculate the distance between contingency and desire.

Politics gives the name of ‘issues’ to its fads.

He wanted to leave the South no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor unremunerative, had sold its negroes to the South and then turned about and by force of arms confiscated what it had unloaded at a profit.

He was a just man, abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, indeed, who stood in awe of the Constitution and his oath of office.

He clearly understood that the Irrepressible Conflict was a Conflict of systems, not a merely sectional and partisan quarrel.

He believed the North equally guilty with the South for the original existence of slavery.

Lincoln met and conferred with the official representatives of the Confederate Government, led by the Vice President of the Confederate States, when it must have been known to him that the Confederacy was nearing the end of its resources…

If slavery be not wrong,” he said, “nothing is wrong,” but he also said and reiterated it time and again, “I have no prejudice against the Southern people.

For Lincoln entertained, with respect to the rehabilitation of the Union, the single wish that the Southern States—to use his homely phraseology—“should come back home and behave themselves,” and if he had lived he would have made this…

Clay was a very great man—a born leader of men.

I have many rights—birthrights—to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian, beside that of more than fifty years’ service upon what may be fairly called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.

The good old vices of Spain,” that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulated gradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and as vital as ever they were.

Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative, the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of events, but the common law of the inevitable.