The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs.

Scarcely anything that I observed in the United States caused me so much sorrow as the contemptuous estimate of the people entertained by those who were bowing the knee to be permitted to serve them.

A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties.

I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.

it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.

it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.