Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent ...and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of u...niting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great questions of freedom for the slaves and the unity of the Nation, liberty and nationality, are now settled. No political ...or party revolutions can unsettle the established facts, that all men are to have in this country equal civil and political rights, and that the United States form one people, one nation. The small questions of today about taxation, appointments, etc., etc., are petty and uninteresting. I cannot consent, after having borne my part in the glorious struggle against slavery during the last seventeen years, now to endure the worry and anxiety belonging to political life for the sake of the honors merely, and without subjects interesting me deeply involved in the struggles.... I am not a candidate, and shall avoid being made one, for the senatorship or for any other high office.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is t...he past, and historians are the people who produce it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a well-settled principle of the international code that where one nation owes another a liquidated debt which it refuses or ...neglects to pay the aggrieved party may seize on the property belonging to the other, its citizens or subjects, sufficient to pay the debt without giving just cause of war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who dare to interpret God's will must never claim Him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another. War springs f...rom the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry... "There!" and it is gone forever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded by them by the inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their orbit--their contemporaries. Their path is one of change and movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect today is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax, their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, there are some who claim I'm more of one nation than another, but that's not true, Eddie. I'm of all nations, I play no favo...rites.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »