Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to our progress. Our life is frittered away by detail. I say let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand. And keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]

The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.

We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.

That government is best which governs least.

Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.

If I am not I, who will be?