God provides for those whom he would make most honorable, by furnishing them with opportunities for achieving valiant and noble deeds.

It is in the storm you see who is worthy to be a pilot; and in battle, who is the soldier....

Be not affrighted, I beseech you, at the dangers which were intended by the immortal gods only as stimulants to exertion.

They, rather, are to be esteemed wretched, who lie torpid in luxurious ease, whom a sluggish calm detains on the great voyage, like vessels that lie weltering on a sea without a gale.

Whom God approves and loves, he exercises, and tries them again and again, and thus inures them to hardship; but those whom he designs to enervate, he spares and indulges and saves them from impending ills....

No man chosen for such an enterprise is ever heard to say, ‘My commander has wronged and dishonored me,’ but rather, ‘He has known well whom to choose.’ Such, too, is the language of those who are required to suffer what would make the…

We stand honored in the divine regards when the great experiment, how much human nature can endure for a virtuous cause, is tried in ourselves....

Should the responsibilities of that successorship ever be devolved upon me, I shall endeavor so to fulfil them, that these dead words should become a living soul.

He did not strain at a gnat before company, on account of its size, and then, privately, swallow a camel.

His patriotism was coëxtensive with his country; it could not be crushed and squeezed in between party lines.

Though liable to err,--and what human being is not?--yet his principles were believed by him to be in accordance with the great moral laws of the universe.

They were thought out from duty and religion, and not carved out of expediency.

When invested with patronage, he never dismissed a man from office because he was a political opponent, and never appointed one to office merely because he was a political friend.

Unwavering fidelity to the great principles of human freedom.”--The Declaration of American Independence, in 1776, was the first complete assertion of human rights, on an extensive scale, ever made by mankind.

In Rome and the States of the Church, where, under the influence of religious and political despotism, the heart of Freedom was supposed to be petrified into insoluble hardness, that heart is now beginning to pulsate with a new life, and…

To what bar of judgment will our own posterity bring us, what doom of infamy will history pronounce upon us, if the United States shall hereafter be found the only portion of Christendom where the principles of our own Declaration of…

These countless millions are to be our kindred; many of them, perhaps, our own descendants; at any rate, our brethren of the human family; for has not God “made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth”?

I put it as a practical question, What shall these millions of our fellow-creatures be?--for it is more than probable that this very generation,--nay, that the actors in public affairs, before the sands of the present year shall have run…

That doom will be what our present conduct predestines.

And this retribution, I believe, will come suddenly, as well as last forever.

Thus will it be with our own brethren or children, should we shut up from them the book of knowledge, or seal their senses so that they could not read it.

Thus will it be with all our God-given faculties, just so far as they are debarred from legitimate exercise upon their appropriate objects.

The love of knowledge will die out, when it ceases to be stimulated by the means of knowledge.

Self-respect will die out, under the ever-present sense of inferiority.

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.