Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win.

My hobby more and more is likely to be common school education, or universal education.

I see no reason why Indians who can give satisfactory proof of having by their own labor supported their families for a number of years, and who are willing to detach themselves from their tribal relations, should not be admitted to the benefit of the homestead act and the privileges of citizenship, and I recommend the passage of a law to that effect. It will be an act of justice as well as a measure of encouragement.

Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.

Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.

[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?