It may never come, but I fancy than no man who has sympathy for the human race does not wish that sometime those who labor should have the whole product of their toil. Probably it will never come, but I wish that the time might come when men who work in the industries would own the industries.
We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.
Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.
Education was in danger from the source that always hampered it – religious fanaticism.
It is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes.
Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man’s origin, capacity and responsibility.
One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.
If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.
I am an agnostic as to the question of God.
I go to a better tailor than any of you and pay more for my clothes. The only difference is that you probably don’t sleep in yours.
We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.
Sympathy is the child of imagination.
If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.
Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.
The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth.
The law is a horrible business.
None meet life honestly and few heroically.
Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the soul and brain of man.
I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man – public opinion.
Chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.