Webster Quotes

“I had hardly ever seen Great Granny Webster at that time, and yet her feelings interested me. She was little more to me than the silhouette of a formidable old woman dressed in black who appeared occasionally at family gatherings and made us feel that she was taking a dangerous risk with her upright spine when circumstances forced her to bend over and kiss her great-grandchildren.”

“I consider my time too valuable to be spent in cultivating acquaintance with a person from whom neither pleasure nor improvement are to be expected.”

“O that I were a man, or that I had powerTo execute my apprehended wishes!I would whip some with scorpions.”

“The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.January 1830”

“It's like coming home," said Webster and he wasn't talking to the dog. "It's like you've been away for a long, long time and then you come home again. And it's so long you don't recognize the place. Don't know the furniture, don't recognize the floor plan. But you know by the feel of it that it's an old familiar place and you are glad you came.""I like it here," said. Ebenezer and he meant Webster's lap, but the man misunderstood."Of course, you do," he said. "It's your home as well as mine. More your home, in fact, for you stayed here and took care of it while I forgot about it.”

“The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good, and difficult for them to do evil. ”

“The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.”

“Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.”

“Wisdom begins at the end.”

“On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.”