I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.

In an unjust society the only place for a just man is prison.

Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet.... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did? Let us not despair or mutiny.

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.