The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

A man's whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

My themes will not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures.