If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

• Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
• No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
• With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.
• I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.
• The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
• Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
• I will prepare and some day my chance will come.
• We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
• Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it the tree is the real thing.
• Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.