Daniel Webster Quotations

I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.

There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.

Let it be borne on the flag under which we rally in every exigency, that we have one country, one constitution, one destiny.

A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

Man is a special being, and if left to himself, in an isolated condition, would be one of the weakest creatures; but associated with his kind, he works wonders.

It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, independence now and independence forever.

An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.

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

The most important thought that ever occupied my mind is that of my individual responsibility to God.

What a man does for others, not what they do for him, gives him immortality.

He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread.

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

The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions.

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.

We have been taught to regard a representative of the people as a sentinel on the watch-tower of liberty.

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

God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.

How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems.

A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils.

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.

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

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

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

Falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves.

The law: it has honored us; may we honor it.

Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man's life

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.

There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.

Inconsistencies of opinion, arising from changes of circumstances, are often justifiable.

No man not inspired can make a good speech without preparation.

The right of an inventor to his invention is no monopoly - in any other sense than a man's house is a monopoly.

Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.

Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.

We are all agents of the same supreme power, the people.

Good intentions will always be pleaded, for every assumption of power; but they cannot justify it ... It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intention, real or pretended.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.

Converse, converse, CONVERSE, with living men, face to face, mind to mind-that is one of the best sources of knowledge.

Nothing is more deceptive or more dangerous than the pretence of a desire to simplify government. The simplest governments are despotisms; the next simplest, limited monarchies; but all republics, all governments of law, must impose numerous limitations and qualifications of authority, and give many positive and many qualified rights.

There is something about men more capable of shaking despotic power than lightening, whirlwind, or earthquake, that is, the threatened indignation of the whole civilized world.

Philosophical argument has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that was in me but my heart has always assured me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be reality.

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 other hand, the cultivation of the religious sentiment represses licentiousnessinspires respect for law and order, and gives strength to the whole social fabric, at the same time that it conducts the human soul upward to the Author of its being.

If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency; if the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will;

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.

If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.

No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country.

If an angel should be winged from Heaven, on an errand of mercy to our country, the first accents that would glow on his lips would be, Beware! Be cautious! You have everything to lose; nothing to gain. We live under the only government that ever existed which was framed by the unrestrained and deliberate consultations of the people. Miracles do not cluster. That which has happened but once in six thousand years cannot be expected to happen often. Such a government, once gone, might leave a void, to be filled, for ages, with revolution and tumult, riot and despotism.

In the nature of things, those who have no property and see their neighbors possess much more than they think them to need, cannot be favorable to laws made for the protection of property. When this class becomes numerous, it becomes clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is naturally ready, at times, for violence and revolution.

A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.

If we abide by the principles taught by the Bible, our country will go on prospering.

Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from...the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence.

Liberty consists in wholesome restraint

Every breeze wafts intelligence from country to country, every wave rolls it and gives it forth, and all in turn receive it. There is a vast commerce of ideas, there are marts and exchanges for intellectual discoveries, and a wonderful fellowship of those individual intelligences which make up the minds and opinions of the age.

Let our object be - our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument - not of oppression and terror, but of wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever.

We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land - nor, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. That chart is the Constitution.

I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.

Let us thank God that we live in an age when something has influence besides the bayonet.

A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

Nothing will ruin the country if the people themselves will' undertake its safety, and nothing can save it, if they leave that safety in any hands but their own.

I believe that the Bible is to be understood and received in the plain and obvious meaning of its passages; for I cannot persuade myself that a book intended for the instruction and conversion of the whole world should cover its true meaning in any such mystery and doubt that none but critics and philosophers can discover it.

Keep cool; anger is not an argument.

Gentlemen, the character of Washington is among the most cherished contemplations of my life. It is a fixed star in the firmament of great names, shining without twinkling or obscuration, with clear, steady, beneficent light.

Nothing of character is really permanent but virtue and personal worth.

Justice is the great interest of man on earth.

What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable.

Mr. President, I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American. I speak for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.

Instruct the mothers of the French people.

Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary. Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity.

The hand that destroys the Constitution rends our Union asunder forever.

This is the Book. I have read the Bible through many times, and now make it a practice to read it through once every year. It is a book of all others for lawyers, as well as divines; and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct. It fits man for life--it prepares him for death.

Corruption of morals is rapid enough in any country without a bounty from government. And...the Chief Magistrate of the United States should be the last man to accelerate its progress.

Mind is the great lever of all things.

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

The Sermon on the Mount cannot be a merely human production. This belief enters into the very depth of my conscience. The whole history of man proves it.

Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals.

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. The fabled birth of Minerva, from the brain of Jove, was hardly more sudden or more perfect than the financial system of the United States, as it burst forth from the conceptions of Alexander Hamilton.

Let us hold fast the great truth, that communities are responsible, as well as individuals; that no government is respectable which is not just. Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society.

When the spotless ermine of the judicial robe fell on John Jay, it touched nothing less spotless than itself.

Philosophic argument, especially that drawn from the vastness of the universe, in comparison with the apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that is in me; but my heart has always assured and reassured me that

Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety.

If the States were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the Convention refused to baptize it by that name.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.

There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today.

The States are nations.

On the light of Liberty you saw arise the light of Peace, like "another morn," "Risen on mid-noon;" and the sky on which you closed your eye was cloudless.

If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.

I thank God, that if I am gifted with little of the spirit which is able to raise mortals to the skies, I have yet none, as I trust, of that other spirit which would drag angels down.

The farmers are the founders of civilization.

The bible fits man for life and prepares him for death

The Bible is a book of faith, and a book of doctrine, and a book of morals, and a book of religion, of especial revelation from God.

There is not a more dangerous experiment than to place property in the hands of one class, and political power in those of another... If property cannot retain the political power, the political power will draw after it the property.

I am committed against every thing which in my judgment, may weaken, endanger, or destroy (the Constitution) ... and especially against all extension of Executive power; and I am committed against any attempt to rule the free people of this country by the power and the patronage of the Government itself....

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington. And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.

The freest government, if it could exist, would not be long acceptable, if the tendency of the laws were to create a rapid accumulation of property in a few hands, and to render the great mass of the population dependent and penniless.

Power naturally and necessarily follows property.

All creeds are fallible and uncertain evidences of evangelical piety.