Rufus Choate Quotes

• We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution.
• 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.
• The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good.
• 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.
• We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag, and keep step to the music of the Union.
• Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.
• A book is the only immortality.
• Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.
• Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

rufus choate