Rufus Choate Quotes
October 1, 1799 – July 13, 1859
More Rufus Choate Quotes
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.
Rufus Choate— Address at Ipswich Centennial (1834).
The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good.
Rufus Choate— Speech in the Senate (2 July 1841).
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.
Rufus Choate— Speech before the New England Society (22 December 1843)
— Possibly related to :
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.
Rufus Choate— "The Power of a State Developed by Mental Culture", an address to the Mercantile Library Association (18 November 1844), published in The Works of Rufus Choate : Memoir, Lectures and Addresses (1862), edited by Samuel Gilman Brown.
Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.
Rufus Choate— Speech at the dedication of the Peabody Institute (29 September 1854).
We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag, and keep step to the music of the Union.
Rufus Choate— Letter to the Whig Convention, Worcester (1 October 1855).
Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.
Rufus Choate— Letter to the Maine Whig Committee (1856). Six years earlier, Choate gave a lecture in Providence which was reviewed by Franklin J. Dickman in the Journal of December 14, 1849. Unless Choate used the words "glittering generalities", and Dickman made reference to them, it would seem as if Dickman must have the credit of originating the catchword. Dickman wrote: "We fear that the glittering generalities of the speaker have left an impression more delightful than permanent". Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
A book is the only immortality.
Rufus Choate— As quoted in Part of a Man's Life (1905) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.
Rufus Choate— As quoted in Dictionary of American Maxims? (1955) by David George Plotkin
— Variant: Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.As quoted in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) edited by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 50.
