Josiah Quincy

Who can witness the movements of that tremulous needle, poised upon its centre, still tending to the polar star, but obedient to his distant hand, armed with a metallic guide, round every point of the compass, at the fiat of his will…

These relations are not only apparent to the most superficial observation of man, but many of them remain inexhaustible funds of successive discovery, perhaps as long as the continued existence of man upon earth.

They were made for more: not only for seasons, for days, and for years, but for SIGNS.

Who, that can conceive the idea of a world without a sun, but must connect with it the extinction of light and heat, of all animal life, of all vegetation and production, leaving the lifeless clod of matter to return to the primitive state…

Many of these relations are indispensable to the existence of human life, and perhaps of the earth itself.

Adams was heard above the tumult: 'I intend to put the question myself!' That word brought order out of chaos.

The turmoil, the darkness, the very 'chaos of anarchy,' which had for three successive days pervaded the American Congress, was dispelled by the magic, the talismanic eloquence, of a single man; and once more the wheels of government and…

Because the clerk of this house--the mere clerk, whom we create, whom we employ, and whose existence depends upon our will--usurps the throne, and sets us, the representatives, the vicegerents of the whole American people, at defiance, and…

We degrade and disgrace our constituents and the country.

Abstract right, deserving as it is of the profound reverence of every ruler over men, is yet not the principle which must guide and govern his conduct; and whoever undertakes to make it exclusively his guide will soon find in the community…

There is no duty more impressive upon the Legislature than that of accommodating the exercise of its power to the spirit of those over whom it is to operate.

I thank you for furnishing me with argument to meet the doctors who pack up the five senses in thirty-five parcels of the brain.

I have classed it with judicial astrology, with alchemy, and with augury; and, as Cicero says he wonders how two Roman augurs could have looked each other in the face without laughing, I have felt something of the same surprise that two…

But the conflict will be terrible, and the progress of improvement retrograde, before its final progress to consummation.

It is a part of the great moral improvement in the condition of man attested by all the records of history.

That the fall of slavery is predetermined in the councils of Omnipotence I cannot doubt.

Slavery has now the power, and falls into convulsions at the approach of freedom.

The conflict between the principle of liberty and the fact of slavery is coming gradually to an issue.

If I cannot prevent the disgrace of the country by the failure of the testator's intention, I can leave a record to future time of what I have done, and what I would have done, to accomplish the great design, if executed well.

It is hard to toil through life for a great purpose, with a conviction that it will be in vain; but possibly seed now sown may bring forth some good fruits.

The private interests and sordid passions into which that fund has already fallen fill me with anxiety and apprehensions that it will be squandered upon cormorants, or wasted in electioneering bribery.

I do most fervently wish that this principle might be made the fundamental law, now and hereafter, so far as may be practicable, of all the appropriations of the Smithsonian bequest.

Nothing conveys to my mind the idea of eternity so forcibly as the grand spectacle of the heavens in a clear night.

I cannot conceive of a world where the stars are not visible, and, if there is one, I trust I shall never be sent to it.

Even the optical delusion, by which the motion of the earth from west to east appears to the eye as the movement of the whole firmament from east to west, swells the conception of magnificence to the incomprehensible infinite.