None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,-one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.

No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.