“I think I understand what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers.”

The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.

My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.

You may as well say, ‘That’s a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.

If you don’t have my army supplied, and keep it supplied, we’ll eat your mules up, sir.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.

Courage – a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty.

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.

There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon.

If people don’t like my opinions, it makes little difference as I don’t solicit their opinions or votes.

In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

War is hell.

A battery of field artillery is worth a thousand muskets.

Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

My attitude is govern as if you’ve run your last race. That’s not to say I’ve run my last race, but govern with a liberation and a freedom; change your mind frame to operate that way.

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.