Not the least vital of the problems which confront our country is the problem of her attitude towards those of her children who, h...aving left her in her hour of need, have been called back to her now on the eve of her longawaited victory, to her whom in loneliness and exile they have at last learned to love. In exile, we have said, but here we must distinguish. There is an economic and there is a spiritual exile. There are those who left her to seek the bread by which men live and there are others, nay, her most favoured children, who left her to seek in other lands that food of the spirit by which a nation of human beings is sustained in life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic i...s a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our system of government, in spite of Vietnam, Cambodia, CIA, Watergate, is still the best system of government on earth. And the ...greatest resource of all are the 215 million Americans who still have within us the strength, the character, the intelligence, the experience, the patriotism, the idealism, the compassion, the sense of brotherhood on which we can rely in the future to restore the greatness to our country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long p...eriod continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?--in which majorities de...cide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen even for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my lov...ed ones happy. I see no further than this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so... necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good government cannot be found on the bargain-counter. We have seen samples of bargain-counter government in the past when low ta...x rates were secured by increasing the bonded debt for current expenses or refusing to keep our institutions up to the standard in repairs, extensions, equipment, and accommodations. I refuse, and the Republican Party refuses, to endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall not be surprised if Colonel [John Charles] Fremont receives less than one hundred electoral votes. But, after all, the goo...d cause has made a great progress. Antislavery sentiment has been created and the people have been educated to a large extent. I did hope that this election would put an end to angry discussion upon this exciting topic by placing the general Government in the right position in regard to it and thereby securing to antislavery effort a foothold among those who have the evil in their midst. But further work is to be done and my sense of duty determines me to keep on in the path I have chosen ... to do what I can ... to aid in forming a public opinion on this subject which will "mitigate and finally eradicate the evil."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »