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.

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

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

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.

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…

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

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

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.

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

But my face in the glass I’ll serenely survey, And with smiles count each wrinkle and furrow— That this worn-out old stuff which is thread-bare to-day Shall become everlasting to-morrow.

The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Moscow sounded, we are told, the death knell of autocracy in Berlin and Vienna.

But—and especially in Kentucky—there was an element that wanted to fight when it was too late; old Union Democrats and Union Whigs who clung to the hull of slavery when the kernel was gone, and proposed to win in politics what had been…

They regarded me as an impudent upstart—since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee—as little better than a carpet-bagger; and had done their uttermost to put me down and drive me out.

We were wholly serious—maybe a trifle visionary, but as upright and patriotic in our intentions and as loyal to our engagements as it was possible for older and maybe better men to be.

Nobody was inclined to dispute his leadership, but everybody was prone to assert his own.

Much of what he said was founded on a basis of fact, some of it was mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to the main point that defeat stared us in the face.

If ever a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon he did during those dark days—the end in darkest night nearer than anyone could divine.

As he lay in his coffin he was no longer the arch rebel, leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republican orators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle of freedom who had done more than all others…

The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet old baby face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty as he saw it, and to the…

A tragedy in truth it was; and yet as his body was lowered into its grave there rose above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty—the flower of peace and love between the sections of the Union to which his life had been a…

Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of inspiration to his countrymen and died not in vain, “our later Franklin” fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.

They loved truth for truth’s sake, even as they loved their country.

Hayes, but I believe him and most of those immediately about him to have been high-minded men who thought they were doing for the best in a situation unparalleled and beset with perplexity.