Rufus Choate

"We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution."

"The courage of New England was the "courage of conscience." It did not rise to that insane and awful passion, the love of war for itself."

"The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good."

"There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop; there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed."

"All that happens in the world of Nature or Man, — every war; every peace; every hour of prosperity; every hour of adversity; every election; every death ; every life; every success and every failure, — all change, — all permanence, — the perished leaf; the unutterable glory of stars, — all things speak truth to the thoughtful spirit."

"Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading."

"We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag, and keep step to the music of the Union."

"Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence."

"A book is the only immortality."

"Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument."