They who know how to employ opportunities will often find that they can create them; and what we can achieve depends less on the amount of time we possess than on the use we make of our time.

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.

If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil's advocate can conjure up.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.

The great creative individual . . . is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.

The opening of a foreign trade, by making them acquainted with new objects, or tempting them by the easier acquisition of things which they had not previously thought attainable, sometimes works a sort of industrial revolution in a country whose resources were previously undeveloped for want of energy and ambition in the people: inducing those who were satisfied with scanty comforts and little work, to work harder for the gratification of their new tastes, and even to save, and accumulate capital, for the still more complete satisfaction of those tastes at a future time.