Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.

We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.

In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.

In our country and in our times no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence; and by these he might claim, in other countries, the elevated rank of a statesman: but unless he speaks, plans, labors, at all times and in all places, for the culture and edification of the whole people, he is not, he cannot be, an American statesman.

To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.