On this waterlogged landscape....are scattered palaces and hovels....It is here that the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.

By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things...among democratic nations they are two unequal things.

I know without needing to hear the voice of the Creator that the stars trace out in space the orbits which His hand has drawn.

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.