Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! — ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is — nor what faith or art or health really is.

My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth. I have look'd for equals and lovers an found them ready for me in all lands, I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them

I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself?

It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it is the duty of government to make its citizens happy - government has no such office.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots.

All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers!

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.