Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought.

Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship; never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.