Early Modern Speeches

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in."

"The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."

"Cast down your bucket where you are—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded."

"Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon my people for centuries untold... may change. Today it is fair. Tomorrow it may be clouded."

"Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together."

"The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition."

"Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times."

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."

"I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies... that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable."

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death."

"Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great... it would have been all right."

"I have not yet begun to fight!"

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in."

"No, there is now no circumstance known in which it can be affirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves."

"My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything."

"Soldiers! I am pleased with you. You have decorated your eagles with immortal glory."

"Soldiers of my Old Guard: I bid you farewell. For twenty years I have constantly accompanied you on the road to honor and glory."

"We have many a monument of past ages; we have the palaces and pyramids, the temples and the cathedrals; but the hydroelectric power plant at Niagara is a monument worthy of our scientific age."

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

"I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too."

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches... Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?"

"It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union."

"Sisters and Brothers of America... It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us."

"I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife."

"In their prosperity shall be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward."

"Women are citizens, and no State has the right to make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."

"Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country."

"So much misery condensed in so little room is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived."