History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.

If the newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.

A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country, and a considerate humanity should be the aim of all beneath it.

An interesting fiction... however paradoxical the assertion may appear... addresses our love of truth- not the mere love of facts expressed by true names and dates, but the love of that higher truth, the truth of nature and principals, which is a primitive law of the human mind.

Death is appalling to those of the most iron nerves, when it comes quietly and in the stillness and solitude of night.