No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.

The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him.

The bashful are always aggressive at heart.

There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.