Stephen Vincent Benet

“As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.”

“He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.”

“We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party,...”

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.”

“You call my candidate a horse thief, and I call yours a lunatic, and we both of us know it's just till election day. It's an American custom, like eating corn on the cob. And, afterwards, we...”

“We can no longer take our own way of life for granted - we know that it may be challenged. And we know this, too - and know it ever more deeply - we know that freedom and democracy are not j...”

“It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a c...”

“Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.”

“Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.”

“A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain, and eyes like burning antracite - that was Dan'l Webster in his prime.”