While old men feel sensibly enough their own advance in years, they do not sufficiently recollect it in those whom they have seenyoung.

You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the [government] ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.

I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.

music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui.

The most uninformed mind with a healthy body is happier than the wisest valetudinarian.

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticism, fancies, and falsehoods.

Light and liberty go together.