If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.

The great hindrance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital.

It is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.

Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately, the matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one's self individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one's place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when the former is done

Darwin was as much of an emancipator as was Lincoln.

Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.