Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

When you find that a book is poor ... waste no more time upon it.

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable.

California, more than any other part of the Union, is a country by itself, and San Francisco a capital.