Law is not law, if it violates the principles of eternal justice.

Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I shall remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last.

our republican ideas cannot be consistently carried out while women are excluded from any share in the government. ... Any class of human beings to whom a position of perpetual subordination is assigned, however much they may be petted and flattered, must inevitably be dwarfed, morally and intellectually.

The rarest attainment is to grow old happily and gracefully.

There have always been a large class of thinkers who deny that the world makes any progress. They say we move in a circle; that evils are never conquered, but only change their forms.

They [slaves] have stabbed themselves for freedom-jumped into the waves for freedom-starved for freedom-fought like very tigers for freedom! But they have been hung, and burned, and shot-and their tyrants have been their historians!

[U]sefulness is happiness, and... all other things are but incidental.