George William Curtis

"The foreboding statesman who knew how Greece had fallen asunder and perished, who knew the mean tenure of European leagues, who knew the absolute necessity of union and the jarring jealousies of secti…"

"Now, so far as we may ascribe any great historic result to a single cause, it is the cotton-gin which has thwarted the Constitution and defeated the expectation of our fathers. The cotton-gin — which …"

"While we read history we make history ... Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer."

"Never fear, true hearts! A people which has shown the quality of its genius as this nation has in the last four years will finish its work. It will go forward and not backward. For our America shall b…"

"There was a time indeed when it was not so, when the bold mariner, Roger Williams, sailed beyond the Boston Light of two centuries ago, and asked of the wilds of the Seekonk and the Mawshawsuc, 'What …"

"And suddenly, in a moment smitten by the avenging storm of fire, choking and struggling in the thick clouds and blood of war, for four years we have desperately wrestled for life, and kneeling among t…"

"The debate forced upon the mind of the country this question. Does the Constitution, made at the time we know, by the men we know, holding the views we know, for the distinct intention it declares, st…"

"But the indication of the strength of our system was moral as well as physical. 'You cannot stand the strain of a civil war and of party spirit combined', said the skeptics. 'You will end in anarchy a…"