It's better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.

You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer.