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

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.

I am from time to time congratulating myself on my general want of success as a lecturer; apparent want of success, but is it nota real triumph? I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again. So there is no danger of my repeating myself, and getting to a barrel of sermons, which you must upset, and begin again with.

This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal.

Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.

Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.