I disbelieve all holy men and holy books.

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.

Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.

The balance of power is the scale of peace.

I wish most anxiously to see my much loved America - it is the Country from whence all reformations must originally spring - I despair of seeing an Abolition of the infernal trafic in Negroes - we must push that matter further on your side the water - I wish that a few well instructed Negroes could be sent among their Brethren in Bondage, for until they are enabled to take their own part nothing will be done.

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.