Quotes from Daniel Webster

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.

No man not inspired can make a good speech without preparation

[I]f we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity.

I mistrust the judgment of every man in a case in which his own wishes are concerned.

The man is free who is protected from injury.

This is a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators. This is a hall for mutual consultation and discussion; not an arena for the exhibition of champions.

Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

He that has "a spirit of detail" will do better in life than many who figured beyond him in the university.Such an one is minute and particular.He adjusts trifles; and these trifles compose most of the business and happiness of life.Great events happen seldom, and affect few; trifles happen every moment to everybody; and though one occurrence of them adds little to the happiness or misery of life, yet the sum total of their continual repetition is of the highest consequence.

If I might comprehend Jesus Christ, I could not believe on Him. He would be no greater than myself. Such is my consciousness of sin and inability that I must have a superhuman Saviour.

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.

When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood.

The people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.

May the sun in his course visit no land more free, more happy, more lovely, than this our own country!

He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of the Public Credit, and it sprung upon its feet.

Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote.

Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital.

Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.

I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston and Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever.

On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth.

The gentleman has not seen how to reply to this, otherwise than by supposing me to have advanced the doctrine that a national debt is a national blessing.

It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it.