The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.

Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.

Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what its form; the free man will resist it if his courage serves.

We lose the forest for the trees, forgetting, even so far as we think at all, that we are trustees for those who come after us, squandering the patrimony which we have received.

The legal relations between the individual and the community which arise out of the production and distribution of property, comprise by far the greater, and more important, part of the law; subtract these and very little content would be left.

There is something monstrous in commands couched in invented and unfamiliar language; an alien master is the worst of all. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .