The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.

General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property.

The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.

The religion of the Bible is the best in the world. I see the infinite value of religion. Let it be always encouraged. A world ofsuperstition and folly have grown up around its forms and ceremonies. But the truth in it is one of the deep sentiments in human nature.

My policy is trust peace and to put aside the bayonet.

The gloomy theology of the orthodox--the Calvinists--I do not, I cannot believe. Many of the notions--nay, most of the notions--which orthodox people have of the divinity of the Bible, I disbelieve. I am so nearly infidel in all my views, that too, in spite of my wishes, that none but the most liberal doctrines can command my assent.

[T]his free and easy old-bachelor sort of life is quite full of fun and jollity. Pease and myself room together; and everything like order and neatness is banished from our presence as a nuisance--old letters and old boots and shoes, duds clean and duds dirty, books and newspapers, tooth-brushes, shoe-brushes, and clothes-brushes, all heaped together on chairs, settees, etc., in dusty and "most admired confusion." Now, what is there imaginable in clean, tidy private life equal to this?