What would Grant say?

"No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works."
To General S.B. Buckner, Fort Donelson

"As the United States is the freest of all nations, so, too, its people sympathize with all people struggling for liberty and self-government; but while so sympathizing it is due to our honor that we should abstain from enforcing our views upon unwilling nations and from taking an interested part, without invitation, in the quarrels between different nations or between governments and their subjects. Our course should always be in conformity with strict justice and law, international and local."
First State of the Union Address

I believe that our Great Maker is preparing the world in His own good time to become one nation, speaking one language, when armies and navies will no longer be required.
Second Inaugural Address

"You can violate the law. The banks may violate the law and be sustained in doing so. But the President of the United States cannot violate the law."
Reply to brokers who urged him to lend $44 million from the US Treasury reserve to banks.

"Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the State forever separate."
Speech at Des Moines, Iowa (1875)

"I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent."
State of the Union Address (5 December 1876)

"My lord, I have heard that your father was a military man. Was that the case?"
To Arthur Richard Wellesley, 2nd Duke of Wellington, son of the Field Marshall Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

"I know only two tunes: one of them is 'Yankee Doodle', and the other one isn't."