“Honesty in its widest sense is always admirable. The trite saying that ‘honesty is the best policy’ has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. [This] seems to be true. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.”

– Robert E. Lee

*Photo source

“Luxury, that baneful poison, has unstrung and enfeebled her sons.”

– Abigail Adams, 
letter to John Adams, 1779

“The Faith you mention has doubtless its use in the World. I do not desire to see it diminished, nor would I endeavour to lessen it in any Man. But I wish it were more productive of good Works, than I have generally seen it: I mean real good Works, Works of Kindness, Charity, Mercy, and Publick Spirit; not Holiday-keeping, Sermon-Reading or Hearing; performing Church Ceremonies, or making long Prayers, filled with Flatteries and Compliments, despis’d even by wise Men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity. The worship of God is a Duty; the hearing and reading of Sermons may be useful; but, if Men rest in Hearing and Praying, as too many do, it is as if a Tree should Value itself on being water’d and putting forth Leaves, tho’ it never produc’d any Fruit.”

– Benjamin Franklin,
excerpt from letter to Joseph Huey, 1753

“Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.”

– Coco Chanel

*Photo source

“It is not necessary for a man to be actively bad in order to make a failure in life; simple inaction will accomplish it. Nature has everywhere written her protest against idleness; everything which ceases to struggle, which remains inactive, rapidly deteriorates. It is the struggle toward an ideal, the constant effort to get higher and further, which develops manhood and character.”

– James Terry White

“Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man’s house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man’s conscience, which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection for which the public faith is pledged by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.” 

– James Madison

“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”

– John Wayne

“A perfect equality will indeed be produced; that is to say, equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of the partitioners, a woeful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above. They never raise what is below: and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what was originally the lowest.”

– Edmund Burke

“Religion and morality are indispensable supports for our political prosperity.”

– George Washington

“That the People have a right to keep and bear Arms; that a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defence of a free state.”

– George Mason

*Hempstead Rifles, a volunteer militia company from Arkansas, 1861 (source)