Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
—Daniel Webster
God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it. Let our object be 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.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: America
No government is respectable which is not just.—Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no mere forms of government, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Government
Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life—it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last forever, but a conscience void of offence before God and man is an inheritance for eternity.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Goodness
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Civilization, Farming
The farmers are the founders of civilization and prosperity.
—Daniel Webster
It is the glorious prerogative of the empire of knowledge that what it gains it never loses. On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of its own power: all its ends become means; all its attainments help to new conquests.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Knowledge
Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals.—Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Work, Employment
Philosophical 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 the gospel of Jesus Christ must be a divine reality.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: The Bible, Faith, Bible
True eloquence does not consist in speech.—It cannot be brought from far.—Labor and learning may toil for it in vain.—Words and phrases may be marshalled in every way, but they cannot compass it.—It must consist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Eloquence
There is nothing upon this earth that can be compared with the faithful attachment of a wife; no creature who, for the object of her love, is so indomitable, so persevering, so ready to suffer and die. Under the most depressing circumstances, woman’s weaknesses become a mighty power; her timidity becomes fearless courage; all her shrinking and sinking passes away; and her spirit acquires the firmness of marble—adamantine firmness—when circumstances drive her to put forth all her energy and the inspiration of her affections.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Wife
Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man’s life.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Murder
Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Action
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
He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread.
—Daniel Webster
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.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Bible
My heart has always assured and reassured me that the gospel of Christ must be a Divine reality.—The sermon on the mount cannot be merely a human production.—This belief enters into the very depth of my conscience.—The whole history of man proves it.
—Daniel Webster
Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Anger
He that has “a spirit of detail” will do better in life than many who figured beyond him in the university.—Such an one is minute and particular.—He adjusts trifles; and these trifles compose most of the business and happiness of life.—Great events happen seldom, and affect few; trifles happen every moment to everybody; and though one occurrence of them adds little to the happiness or misery of life, yet the sum total of their continual repetition is of the highest consequence.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Facts, Trifles
Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Cities
It is a noble faculty of our nature which enables us to connect our thoughts, sympathies, and happiness, with what is distant in place or time; and looking before and after, to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity. There is a moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors, which elevates the character and improves the heart. Next to the sense of religious duty and moral feeling, I hardly know what should bear with stronger obligation on a liberal and enlightened mind, than a consciousness of an alliance with excellence which is departed; and a consciousness, too, that in its acts and conduct, and even in its sentiments and thoughts, it may be actively operating on the happiness of those that come after it.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Ancestry
There is no evil we cannot face or fly from, but the consciousness of duty disregarded.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Duty
Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Liberty
When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and, before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are.
—Daniel Webster
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
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
Knowledge does not comprise all which is contained in the large term of education. The feelings are to be disciplined; the passions are to be restrained; true and worthy motives are to be inspired; a profound religious feeling is to be instilled, and pure morality inculcated under all circumstances. All this is comprised in education.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Education
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.
—Daniel Webster
The world is governed more by appearances than by realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Appearance, Intelligence, Reality
If we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Authority
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