Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

All that a good government aims at... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time.

The sun had not risen, but the vault of heaven was rich with the winning, softness that "brings and shuts the day," while the whole air was filled with the carols of birds, the hymns of the feathered tribe.

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.

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management.