The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.

Did you ever see a portrait of a great man without perceiving strong traits of pain and anxiety?

An honest, sensible, humane man, . . . laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity . . . is really the most respectable man in society, [and] makes himself and all about him most happy.

My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes.... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.

If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle

One useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three is a Congress.

We are in the the very midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.