... your spiritual teachers caution you against enquiry--tell you not to read certain books; not to listen to certain people; to beware of profane learning; to submit your reason, and to receive their doctrines for truths. Such advice renders them suspicious counsellors.

... so far from entrenching human conduct within the gentle barriers of peace and love, religion has ever been, and now is, the deepest source of contentions, wars, persecutions for conscience sake, angry words, angry feelings, backbitings, slanders, suspicions, false judgments, evil interpretations, unwise, unjust, injurious, inconsistent actions.

... the happiness of a people is the only rational object of government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.

the language of truth is too simple for inexperienced ears.

Moral truth, resting entirely upon the ascertained consequences of actions, supposes a process of observation and reasoning.

It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race.

I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mahomedan nor Theist; I am but a member of the human family.