Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.

We are not accountable for the sins of "Adam".

Commerce makes friends, religion makes enemies; the one enriches, and the other impoverishes; the one thrives best where the truth is told, the other where falsehoods are believed.

The more false we destroy, the more room there will be for the true.

Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty, and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment.

If the money is raised by taxation, then the burden will fall where it ought to fall, . . . and the rich and stingy will no longer be able to evade the duties of citizenship and of humanity.

It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.