Quotes
Quotes about Men
For men at most differ as heaven and earth,
But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.
Who can fancy warless men?
Warless? war will die out late then. Will it ever? late or soon?
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?
Remember that sore saying spoken once
By Him that was the Truth, 'How hard it is
For the rich man to enter into heaven!'
Let all rich men remember that hard word.
Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.
Ambition
Is like the sea wave, which the more you drink
The more you thirst--yea--drink too much, as men
Have done on rafts of wreck--it drives you mad.
Our Country,--whether bounded by the St. John's and the Sabine, or however otherwise bounded or described, and be the measurements more or less,--still our Country, to be cherished in all our hearts, to be defended by all our hands.
The poor must be wisely visited and liberally cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into mendacity, nor want exasperated into crime.
Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise,--all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of
ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.
You think they are crusaders sent
From some infernal clime,
To pluck the eyes of sentiment
And dock the tail of Rhyme,
To crack the voice of Melody
And break the legs of Time.
Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.
There is that glorious epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the historian,in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men:"Good Americans when they die go to Paris."
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.
A democracy,--that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people;of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.
All men desire to be immortal.
Ay, soon upon the stage of life,
Sweet, happy children, you will rise,
To mingle in its care and strife,
Or early find the peaceful skies.
Then be it yours, while you pursue
The golden moments, quick to haste
Some noble work of love to do,
Nor suffer one bright hour to waste.
The play is done; the curtain drops,
Slow falling to the prompter's bell
A moment yet the actor stops
And looks around to say farewell.
It is an irksome word and task:
And when he's laughed and said his say
He shows, as he removes the mask,
A face that's anything but gay.
The masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has so long divided them.
Had they [the Tories] been in the wilderness they would have complained of the Ten Commandments.
Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving HOW NOT TO DO IT.
The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride.
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
Round and round, like a dance of snow
In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go
Floating the women faded for ages,
Sculptured in stone on the poet's pages.
The cold blast at the casement beats;
The window-panes are white;
The snow whirls through the empty streets;
It is a dreary night!
Aid the dawning, tongue and pen;
Aid it, hopes of honest men!
