Everywhere do I percieve a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage underthat name and pretext of commonwealth.

It's wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else's enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose.

An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man.

We cannot go to heaven in featherbeds.

The chief aim of their constitution is that, whenever public needs permit, all citizens should be free, so far as possible, to withdraw their time and energy from the service of the body, and devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind. For that, they think, is the real happiness of life.

Every tribulation which ever comes our way either is sent to be medicinal, if we will take it as such, or may become medicinal, if we will make it such, or is better than medicinal, unless we forsake it.

. . . the state of things and the dispositions of men were then such, that a man could not well tell whom he might trust or whom he might fear.