That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. |
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. |
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. |
Fame is proof that the people are gullible. |
For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail? |
The less government we have the better - the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual. |
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. |
People only see what they are prepared to see. |
Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. |
Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy. |
Liberty is a slow fruit. |
Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State. |
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had? |
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. |
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. |
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. |
In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better. |
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. |
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. |
Good men must not obey the laws too well. |
