There is no slavery but ignorance.
It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.
In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.
Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
As far as I am concerned I wish to be out on the high seas. I wish to take my chances with wind, and wave, and star. And I had rather go down in the glory and grandeur of the storm, than rot in any orthodox harbor.
It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.
With soap, baptism is a good thing.
There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, east a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.
Every man who expresses an honest thought is a soldier in the army of intellectual liberty.
He loves his country best who strives to make it best.
If I had my way I’d make health catching instead of disease.
One laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still.
One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.
The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.
No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.
And why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?
Liberty a word without which all other words are vain.
Nothing but truth is immortal.
There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.