When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.

When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.