We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.
Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partizans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.
All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.
Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.
Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.
Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.