America has proved that it is practicable to elevate the mass of mankind—the laboring or lower class—to raise them to self-respect, to make them competent to act a part in the great right and the great duty of self-government; and she has proved that this may be done by education and the diffusion of knowledge. She holds out an example a thousand times more encouraging than ever was presented before to those nine-tenths of the human race who are born without hereditary fortune or hereditary rank.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: America
Though we live in a reading age and in a reading community, yet the preaching of the Gospel is the form in which human agency has been and still is most efficaciously employed for the spiritual improvement of men.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Preaching
Our profession is good if practised in the spirit of it; it is damnable fraud and iniquity when its true spirit is supplied by a spirit of mischief-making and money-getting.—The love of fame is extinguished; every ardent wish for knowledge repressed; conscience put in jeopardy, and the best feelings of the heart indurated by the mean, money-catching, abominable practises, which cover with disgrace some of the modem practitioners of law.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Lawyers
Knowledge has, in our time, triumphed, and is triumphing, over prejudice and over bigotry. The civilized and Christian world is fast learning the great lesson, that difference of nation does not imply necessary hostility, and that all contact need not be war. The whole world is becoming a common field for intellect to act in. Energy of mind, genius, power, wheresoever it exists may speak out in any tongue, and the world will hear it.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Knowledge
Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
—Daniel Webster
Other misfortunes may be borne, or their effects overcome. If disastrous war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it; if it exhaust our treasury, future industry may replenish it; It were but a trifle even if the walls of yonder Capitol were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and its gorgeous decorations be all covered by the dust of the valley. All these might be rebuilt. But who shall reconstruct the fabric of demolished government? Who shall rear again the well-proportioned columns of constitutional liberty? No, if these columns fall, they will be raised not again. they will be the remnants of a more glorious edifice than Greece or Rome ever saw, the edifice of constitutional American liberty.
—Daniel Webster
For my part, though I like the investigation of particular questions, I give up what is called “the science of political economy.”—There is no such science.—There are no rules on these subjects, so fixed and invariable, that their aggregate constitutes a science.—I have recently run over twenty volumes, from Adam Smith to Professor Dew, and from the whole if I were to pick out with one hand all the mere truisms, and with the other all the doubtful propositions, little would be left.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Politics
There is something among men more capable of shaking despotic power than lightning, whirlwind, or earthquake; that is the threatened indignation of the whole civilized world.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Anger, Opinion
There is always room at the top.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Success & Failure, Success
If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work on brass, time will efface it. If we rear temples, they will crumble to dust. But if we work on mens immortal minds, if we impress on them high principles, the just fear of God, and love for their fellow-men, we engrave on those tablets something which no time can efface, and which will brighten and brighten to all eternity.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Education, Mind
Liberty consists in wholesome restraint.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Liberty
The criminal law is not founded on the principle of vengeance; it uses evil only as the means of preventing greater evil.
—Daniel Webster
Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Liberty
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.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Government
Political and professional fame cannot last forever, but a conscience void of offence before God and man is an inheritance for eternity. Religion, therefore, is a necessary, an indispensable element in any great human character. There is no living without it. Religion is the tie that connects man with his Creator, and holds him to his throne. If that tie is sundered or broken, he floats away a worthless atom in the universe, its proper attractions all gone, its destiny thwarted, and its whole future nothing but darkness, desolation and death. A man with no sense of religious duty is he whom the Scriptures describes in so terse but terrific a manner, as “living without hope and without God in the world.” Such a man is out of his proper being, out of the circle of all his duties, out of the circle of all his happiness, and away, far, far away from the purposes of his creation.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Religion, Conscience
If all my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would soon regain all the rest.
—Daniel Webster
The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions.
—Daniel Webster
If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth’s central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or another, in some place or another, the volcano will break out and flame to heaven.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Liberty
When the spotless ermine of the judicial robe fell on John Jay, it touched nothing less spotless than itself.
—Daniel Webster
I see nothing in it new and valuable. What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Originality, Innovation
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.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Ideas
The morning itself, few inhabitants of cities know anything about. Among all our good people, not one in a thousand sees the sun rise once in a year. They know nothing of the morning. Their idea of it is that it is that part of the day which comes along after a cup of coffee and a piece of toast. With them, morning is not a new issuing of light, a new bursting forth of the sun, a new waking-up of all that has life from a sort of temporary death, to behold again the works of God, the heavens and the earth; it is only a part of the domestic day, belonging to reading newspapers, answering notes, sending the children to school, and giving orders for dinner. The first streak of light, the earliest purpling of the east, which the lark springs up to greet, and the deeper and deeper coloring into orange and red, till at length the “glorious sun is seen, regent of the day”—this they never enjoy, for they never see it. I never thought that Adam had much the advantage of us from having seen the world while it was new. The manifestations of the power of God, like his mercies, are “new every morning” and fresh every moment. We see as fine risings of the sun as ever Adam saw; and its risings are as much a miracle now as they were in his day—and, I think, a good deal more, because it is now a part of the miracle, that for thousands and thousands of years he has come to his appointed time, without the variation of a millionth part of a second. I know the morning—I am acquainted with it, and I love it. I love it fresh and sweet as it is—a daily new creation, breaking forth and calling all that have life and breath and being to a new adoration, new enjoyments, and new gratitude.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Morning
Truth is always congruous and agrees with itself; every truth in the universe agrees with all others.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Truth
It is, Sir, as I have said, a small College, And yet, there are those who love it.
—Daniel Webster
While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! 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! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full and high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a strip erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth? nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!
—Daniel Webster
All that is best in the civilization of today, is the fruit of Christ’s appearance among men.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Civilization
We have been taught to regard a representative of the people as a sentinel on the watch-tower of liberty.
—Daniel Webster
Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Cities
There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Honesty
Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are answered.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Mind
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
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- John Quincy Adams American Head of State
- Henry Clay American Politician
- Maria Mitchell American Astronomer
- George Bancroft American Historian
- James Madison American Statesman, President
- Horace Mann American Educator
- John F. Kennedy American Head of State
- Bainbridge Colby American Politician
- Billie Holiday American Jazz Singer
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