Now the struggle for life is so sharp, competition is so severe, that few men can succeed who carry a useless burden. The businessmen of our country are compelled to lead temperate lives, otherwise their credit is gone.

The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith.

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.

Talent has the four seasons: spring, that is to say, the sowing of the seeds; summer, growth; autumn, the harvest; winter, intellectual death. But there is now and then a genius who has no winter, and, no matter how many years he may live, on the blossom of his thought no snow falls. Genius has the climate of perpetual growth.

All should be taught that the highest ambition is to be happy, and to add to the well-being of others; that place and power are not necessary to success; that the desire to acquire great wealth is a kind of insanity. They should be taught that it is a waste of energy, a waste of thought, a waste of life, to acquire what you do not need and what you do not really use for the benefit of yourself or others.

I thank thee, Mother Nature, that thou hast put ingenuity enough in the brain of a child, when attacked by a brutal parent, to throw up a little breastwork in the shape of a lie.

If Jehovah cannot support his religion without going into partnership with a State Legislature, I think he ought to give it up.