These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.

When men struggle for the single life God has given them ... even their own kind seem no more than the beasts of the wood.

There are evils worse than death.

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.

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil.

Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean.