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

So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

Muhammad professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.

You need not value it yourself if you do not wish to; but you ought to allow it to us who do value it.

Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions

I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.

What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.