I have no particular love for my species, but own to an exhaustless fund of compassion

The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.

Every evil has its good, and every ill an antidote.

[To a woman who claimed she'd rather be dead than unconfined and unfashionable:] My dear, if you continue to lace as tightly as you do now, you will not long have the privilege of choice. You will be both dead and out of fashion.

I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.

Of all the calamities to which humanity is subject, none is so dreadful as insanity. ... All experience shows that insanity seasonably treated is as certainly curable as a cold or a fever.

I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come to place before the Legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. I come as the advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane men and women; of beings sunk to a condition from which the unconcerned world would start with real horror.