If there should prove to be one real, living Free State Democrat in Kansas, I suggest that it might be well to catch him and stuff and preserve his skin as an interesting specimen of that soon-to-be-extinct variety of the genus Democrat.

Nature abhors annihilation.

Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.

With Kansas, I had a four-year deal. The initial two months were real tough. I had to adjust a lot. Then, things started looking up.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in that we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy; Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

There might be some serious fun in politics.

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.

If you keep feeling a point that has been sharpened, the point cannot long preserve its sharpness.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

That fatal drollery called a representative government.

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame.

I understand a ship to be made for the carrying and preservation of the cargo, and so long as the ship can be saved, with the cargo, it should never be abandoned. This Union likewise should never be abandoned unless it fails and the possibility of its preservation shall cease to exist, without throwing passengers and cargo overboard.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‚President Can’t Swim.‘

Economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.

I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

When digital technology started becoming the norm, you’ve got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won’t last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.