Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.

The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.