A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there.

Republics, one after another . . . have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people. . . .

To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.

The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward.

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

A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.