No punishment is so terrible as prosperous guilt.
Knowledge is essential to freedom.
Progress, the growth of power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.
The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people’s energy, intellect, and virtues.
The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.
Perhaps in our presence, the most heroic deed on earth is done in some silent spirit, the loftiest purpose cherished, the most generous sacrifice made, and we do not suspect it. I believe this greatness to be most common among the multitude, whose names are never heard.
Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities.
The fewer the voices on the side of truth, the more distinct and strong must be your own.
War will never yield but to the principles of universal justice and love, and these have no sure root but in the religion of Jesus Christ.
Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.
One of the tremendous evils of the world, is the monstrous accumulation of power in a few hands.
It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions, from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.
Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.
Home – the nursery of the Infinite.
We never know a greater character unless there is in ourselves something congenial to it.
How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.
All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.
Mistakes and errors are the discipline through which we advance.
An earnest purpose finds time, or makes it. It seizes on spare moments, and turns fragments to golden account.
The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot.