The war for our Union, with all the constitutional issues which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eyes of history. It freed the country from the social plague which until then had made political development impossible in the United States. More and more, as the years pass, does the meaning stand forth as the sole meaning.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.

Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.