The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.