The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?

I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.