Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? Or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are NOT good?

The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Do what you know you ought to do. Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor's advice? There is a nearerneighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.

I was never molested by any person but those who represented the State. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers.