But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams; and, in those Manchesters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.

Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.

[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.

Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.

Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.