Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of day.

Heroes did not make our liberties; they but reflected and illustrated them.

I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.

Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that the United States is a giant without bones. Since that time our gristle has been rapidly hardening.

Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.

The chief instrument of American statistics is the census, which should accomplish a two-fold object. It should serve the country by making a full and accurate exhibit of the elements of national life and strength, and it should serve the science of statistics by so exhibiting general results that they may be compared with similar data obtained by other nations.

Right reason is stronger than force.