Henry Clay Quotes

An oppressed people are authorized whenever
they can to rise and break their fetters.

In all cases where incidental powers are acted upon, the principal and incidental ought to be congenial with each other, and partake of a common nature. The incidental power ought to be strictly subordinate and limited to the end proposed to be obtained by the specified power. In other words, under the name of accomplishing one object which is specified, the power implied ought not to be made to embrace other objects, which are not specified in the constitution.

Sir, I would rather be right than to be President.

I hope that it will yet be said, America is America's best customer.

All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.

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

Sir, if you wish to avoid foreign commerce; give up all your prosperity. It is the thing protected, not the instrument of protection, that involves you in war. Commerce engenders collision, collision war, and war, the argument supposes, leads to despotism. Would the councils of that statesman be deemed who would recommend that the nation should be unarmed—that in the art of war, the material spirit, and martial exercises, should be prohibited—…—and that the great body of the people should be taught that the national happiness was to be found in perpetual peace alone? No, sir.

I have no commiseration for princes. My sympathies are reserved for the great mass of mankind ….

I prefer the troubled ocean of war...to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.

My friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them!... If there were two Henry Clays, one of them would make the other President of the United States!... It is a diabolical intrigue, I know now, which has betrayed me. I am the most unfortunate man in the history of parties: always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or any one, would be sure of an election.

Sir, I had rather be right than to be President.

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

What is the nature of this government? It is emphatically federal, vested with an aggregate of special powers for general purposes, conceded by existing sovereignties, who have themselves retained what is not so conceded. It is said that there are cases in which it must act on implied powers. This is not controverted, but the implication must be necessary, and obviously flow from enumerated power with which it is allied.

Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.

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