Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light...
The Civil War created in this country what had never existed before - a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union; it was the rebirth of the Union.
Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great fields on which men likehimself struggle, with unflagging, pathetic hope, toward better things.... He is a guide, a counselor, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
There is no indispensable man. The government will not collapse and go to pieces if any one of the gentlemen who are seeking to be entrusted with its guidance should be left at home.
Bagehot did what so many thousand of young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and then, having prepared himself to practise law, followed another large body of young men in deciding to abandon it.
You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.
Such a mind we must desire to see in a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that arouses but does not belabour, amuses and yet subtly instructs.
Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.
I have rather a strange objection to talking from the back platform of a train.... It changes too often. It moves around and shifts its ground too often. I like a platform that stays put.