Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.
My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.
You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.
The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of thecivilized world, has affected us very profoundly.... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore.
I must beg you to indulge me in the matter of hyphens.... You will find that I have marked out a great many in the proofs. We arein danger of Germanizing our printing by using them so much, and I have a very decided preference in the matter.
...We are intensely proud of their noble record and are glad to have had the whole world see how irresistible they are in their might when a cause which America holds dear is at stake. The whole nation has reason to be proud of them.