Rufus Choate Quotes

#1. We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and I keep step to the music of the Union.

Rufus Choate

#2. 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.

Rufus Choate

#3. A book is the only immortality

Rufus Choate

#4. 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

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

Rufus Choate

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

Rufus Choate

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

Rufus Choate

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

Rufus Choate

#9. Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.

Rufus Choate

#10. 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.

Rufus Choate

#11. 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.

Rufus Choate

#12. 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

#13. Knowledge is power as well as fame.

Rufus Choate

#14. No lawyer can afford to be ignorant of the Bible.

Rufus Choate

#15. 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.

Rufus Choate

#16. 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.

Rufus Choate

#17. 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