Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.

A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.