Rufus Choate Quotations

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

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

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 I keep step to the music of the Union.

A book is the only immortality.

Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.

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.

No lawyer can afford to be ignorant of the Bible.

We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution.

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.

Its Constitution--the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.

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

Power, carried to extremes, is always liable to reaction.

Knowledge is power as well as fame.

You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.

Mathematics may, be briefly defined as the science of quantities, and is one of the most important of disciplining studies which engage the practical student.

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.

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.

Anything more low, obscene, feculent, the manifold heaving's of history have not cast up. We shall come to the worship of onions, cats and things vermiculite.

I will look, your Honor, and endeavor to find a precedent, if you require it; though it would seem to be a pity that the Court should lose the honor of being the first to establish so just a rule.