Freedom has nothing to do with having the right to vote for your oppressor; freedom is not having any form of oppression.

As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.

Patience and fortitude conquer all things.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to bewritten, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.