I have been long sensible that while I was endeavoring to render our country the greatest of all services, that of regenerating the public education, and placing our rising generation on the level of our sister states (which they have proudly held heretofore), I was discharging the odious function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a patient insensible of needing it.

The only true corrective of Constitutional abuses is education.

Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.

Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree.