The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.
Henry David ThoreauWhat is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.
Henry David ThoreauWhy do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways. Let us sing.
Henry David Thoreau