The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

When fortune has been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone, an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects.

A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just; and its justice constitutes its greatness and beauty.

To get the inestimable good that freedom of the press assures one must know how to submit to the inevitable evil it gives rise to.

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.

America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.