Daniel Webster (1782–1852) was an American Federalist- and later Whig-party politician, lawyer, and orator who served as his country’s secretary of state.
Born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, Webster graduated from Dartmouth in 1801, entered the bar in 1805, and practiced law in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A renowned orator, he represented New Hampshire 1813–17 and then Massachusetts 1823–27 in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate 1827–41 and 1845–50.
Webster supported protective tariffs, was a strong pro-Union advocate, and supported the Compromise of 1850 to preserve the Union. A leader of the Whig Party, Webster unsuccessfully ran for president in 1836.
Webster later served as President W. H. Harrison’s secretary of state 1841–43 and negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which settled boundary disputes with Canada and improved relations with Great Britain. He also developed America’s policy toward Asia by formulating a statement on Hawaii in 1842 and inaugurating the first diplomatic mission to China in 1843.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Daniel Webster
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: Trifles, Facts
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
Suppose your candidate for fame pursues unremittingly the object of his love, through every difficulty and over every obstacle, till at last he overtakes her ladyship, and is permitted to kiss the hem of her garment on mount immortality, what will the dear-bought damsel boot him? If he take her to his bosom, she has no flesh and blood to warm it. If he taste of her lip, there is no more nectar in it than there are sunbeams in a cucumber.—Every rascal who has been bold and fearless enough, Nimrod, Cataline, and Tom Paine, all have had a smack at her before him: They have all more or less become famous, and will be remembered much longer than better men.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Fame
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
What do we want with this vast, worthless area? This region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless, uninviting, and not a harbor on it? What use have we for this country?
—Daniel Webster
Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Anger
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
The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward to his object,—this, this is eloquence; or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence; it is action, noble, sublime, godlike action.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Eloquence
We have been taught to regard a representative of the people as a sentinel on the watch-tower of liberty.
—Daniel Webster
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
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
An individual is more apt to change, perhaps, than all the world around him.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Change
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: Faith, The Bible, Bible
Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man’s life.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Murder
The home of freedom, and the hope of the down-trodden and oppressed among the nations of the earth.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: America
There is a boldness, a spirit of daring, in religious reformers, not to be measured by the general rules which control men’s purposes and actions.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Reform
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
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
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
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Farming, Civilization
One may live as a conqueror, a king, or a magistrate; but he must die a man. The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality, to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations—the relation between the creature and his Creator.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Death
Falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Lying
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
Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are answered.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Mind
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
Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Liberty
There is no evil we cannot face or fly from, but the consciousness of duty disregarded.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Duty
The law is made to protect the innocent by punishing the guilty.
—Daniel Webster
Lawyers on opposite sides of a case are like the two parts of shears; they cut what comes between them, but not each other.
—Daniel Webster
Topics: Lawyers
This is a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators. This is a hall for mutual consultation and discussion; not an arena for the exhibition of champions.
—Daniel Webster
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