Neither do I acknowledge the right of Plymouth to the whole rock. No, the rock underlies all America: it only crops out here.

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

The community which does not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.

No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.

Statutes are mere milestone, telling how far yesterday's thought had traveled; and the talk of the sidewalk today is the law of the land. With us, law in nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

Society,--the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world's university, at once a school and a theater, the spur and the crown of ambition, the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit, the power that gives government leave to be, and outruns the lazy Church in fixing the moral sense of the eye.