It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.

When one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens.

Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life...but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them as desirable.

A state of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the genuine principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions to premises which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world.

The principles which men profess on any controverted subject are usually a very incomplete exponent of the opinions they really hold.

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.