Henry Clay - People Quotes

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An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

Henry Clay

Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.

Henry Clay

Sir, if you wish to avoid foreign commerce; give up all your prosperity. It is the thing protected, not the instrument of protection, that involves you in war. Commerce engenders collision, collision war, and war, the argument supposes, leads to despotism. Would the councils of that statesman be deemed who would recommend that the nation should be unarmed—that in the art of war, the material spirit, and martial exercises, should be prohibited—…—and that the great body of the people should be taught that the national happiness was to be found in perpetual peace alone? No, sir.

Henry Clay

A nation's character is the sum of its splendid deeds; they constitute one common patrimony, the nation's inheritance. They awe foreign powers, they arouse and animate our own people.

Henry Clay