Henry Clay Quotes

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

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

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the gratefully and appreciating heart.

The time will come when Winter will ask you what you were doing all Summer.

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

Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight. They are evidence of truth, but only evidence...But a solitary precedent...which has never been reexamined, cannot be conclusive.

It consists in the genius of the nation, which is prone to peace; in that desire to arrange, by friendly negotiation, our disputes with all nations…. But a new state of things has arisen: negotiation has become hopeless. The power with whom it was to be conducted, if not annihilated, is in the situation that precludes it; and the subject-matter of it is in danger of being snatched forever from our power. Longer delay would be construed into a dereliction of our right, and would amount to a treachery to ourselves.

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

Statistics are no substitue for judgement.

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

War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality, which continue to germinate and diffuse their baneful influence long after it has ceased. Dazzling by its glitter, pomp and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, from engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life.

I am not, sir, in favor of cherishing the passion of conquest. I am permitted … to indulge the hope of seeing, ere long, the new United States, (if you will allow me the expression,) embracing not only the old ….

We have had good and bad Presidents, and it is a consoling reflection that the American Nation possesses such elements of prosperity that the bad Presidents cannot destroy it, and have been able to do no more than slightly to retard the public's advancement.

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.

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