Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

It is as easy for most of us to keep from stealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much voluntary morality involved in one process as the other.

But the paradox is here: when cultivated people do stay away from a certain portion of the population, when all social advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument for the continued withholding.

The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.

Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.