From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, as presented on my Microsoft Bookshelf 1991 CD-ROM on my Pentium 1 tower this evening:

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not live and utter it.

~ A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849]

And this helped me more than I expected:

The fate of the country [..] does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street each morning.

~ Slavery in Massachusetts [1854]