The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?