“A politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.”

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

Virtue is not always amiable.

No man is entirely free from weakness and imperfection in this life.

We understand now, we’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding that who we are is who we were.

If the fundamental principles in the Declaration of Independence, as self-evident truths, are real truths, the existence of slavery, in any form, is a wrong.

Go on and improve in everything worthy.

To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.

In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.

Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.

If conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.

Posterity – you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.

My toast would be, may our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.

I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong.

It is my wish to fill every moment of my time with some action of the mind which may contribute to the pleasure or the improvement of my fellow creatures.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

For there is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth, has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight.

Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.

But when once the earth has sucked up a dead man’s blood, there is no way to raise him up.

Every man is like the company he wont to keep.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

To play a repressed gay man, I had to explore what life was like in an era of sexual repression.

In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

A man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.