The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow-citizens . Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to the air.

The world is not looking for servants, there are plenty of these, but for masters, men who form their purposes and then carry them out, let the consequences be what they may.

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.

They [the children] live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,--and these stupid [grown-up people] try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.

They do not need our praise. They do not need that our admiration should sustain them. There is no immortality that is safer than theirs. We come not for their sakes but for our own, in order that we may drink at the same springs of inspiration from which they themselves drank.

The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.

We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead.