Genius is intellect constructive.

By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold.

If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,--if onlythat the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.

The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.

Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.

The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.