Rufus Choate Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag, and keep step to the music of the Union.

Rufus Choate
Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.

Rufus Choate
The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good.

Rufus Choate
I always approach Judge [Lemuel] Shaw as a savage approaches his fetish, knowing that he is ugly but feeling that he is great.

Rufus Choate
There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop; there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed.

Rufus Choate
Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.

Rufus Choate
All that happens in the world of Nature or Man, — every war; every peace; every hour of prosperity; every hour of adversity; every election; every death ; every life; every success and every failure, — all change, — all permanence, — the perished leaf; the unutterable glory of stars, — all things speak truth to the thoughtful spirit.

Rufus Choate
Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law.

Rufus Choate
We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution.

Rufus Choate
The courage of New England was the "courage of conscience." It did not rise to that insane and awful passion, the love of war for itself.

Rufus Choate