Fear, prejudice, malice, and the love of approbation bribe a thousand men where gold bribes one.
Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.
A good character, like a Gibraltar, will stand against the testimony of all the rascals in the universe, no matter how they assail it. It will stand, and it will stand firmer and grander the more it is assaulted.
A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.
The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.
Perjury is the basest and meanest and most cowardly of crimes. What can it do? Perjury can change the common air that we breathe into the axe of an executioner.
Justice should remove the bandage from her eyes long enough to distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.
A good way to make children tell the truth is to tell it yourself. Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your banker.
No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.
Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the keeping of the dead.
A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.
What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.
Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.
The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar - his life has been a success.
As long as we can get redress in the courts, as long as the laws shall be honestly administered, as long as honesty and intelligence sit upon the bench, as long as intelligence sits in the chairs of jurors, this country will stand, the law will be enforced, and the law will be respected.
The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others.
Neutrality is generally used as a mask to hide unusual bitterness. Sometimes it hides what it is - nothing. It always stands for hollowness of head or bitterness of heart, sometimes for both.
It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.
Voltaire, as full of life as summer is full of blossoms, giving his ideas upon all subjects at the expense of prince and king, was exiled to England.
Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.