Henry Clay Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean.

Henry Clay
How often are we forced to charge fortune with partiality towards the unjust!

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

Henry Clay
Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition.

Henry Clay
I have no commiseration for princes. My sympathies are reserved for the great mass of mankind ….

Henry Clay
Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.

Henry Clay
Honor and good faith and justice are equally due from this country toward the weak as toward the strong.

Henry Clay
[Andrew Jackson] is ignorant, passionate, hypocritical, corrupt, and easily swayed by the basest men who surround him.

Henry Clay
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.

Henry Clay
The gentleman cannot have forgotten his own sentiment, uttered even on the floor of this House, "Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must."

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
The gentleman [Josiah Quincy] can not have forgotten his own sentiment, uttered even on the floor of this House, 'peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must'.

Henry Clay
It has been my invariable rule to do all for the Union. If any man wants the key of my heart, let him take the key of the Union, and that is the key to my heart.

Henry Clay
I have heard something said about allegiance to the South. I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance…The Union, sir, is my country.

Henry Clay
The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity—unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.

Henry Clay
Alexander Smyth: You, sir, speak for the present generation, but I speak for posterity.
Henry Clay: Yes, and you seem resolved to speak until the arrival of your audience.

Henry Clay
I am for resistance by the sword. No man in the nation desires peace more than I. But I prefer the troubled ocean of war…to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.

Henry Clay
Let him who elevates himself above humanity... say, if he pleases, "I will never compromise"; but let no one who is not above the frailties of our common nature disdain compromise.

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