If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a happier or a better population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.

The triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind - the lower animals.

Judgement is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all?