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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Daniel Webster (1782–1852)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1198
AUTHOR: Daniel Webster (1782–1852)
QUOTATION: If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work on brass, time will efface it. If we rear temples, they will crumble to dust. But if we work on men’s immortal minds, if we impress on them high principles, the just fear of God, and love for their fellow-men, we engrave on those tablets something which no time can efface, and which will brighten and brighten to all eternity.
ATTRIBUTION: DANIEL WEBSTER, secretary of state, speech to the City Council, Boston, Massachusetts, May 22, 1852.—The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, vol. 13, pp. 518–19 (1903).

Webster served in Congress as a representative from New Hampshire, 1813–1817, and from Massachusetts, 1823–1827, and as a senator from Massachusetts, 1827–1841 and 1845–1850.
SUBJECTS: Mind