Freedom of thought and the right of private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every other corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.
Sam Adams, Speech, State House of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (August 1, 1776).
We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.
No one can hate petitions worse than I, and no one has less faith in them than I. But for my champion I am willing to try any means that invades no other’s right, even though I have little hope in it.
Voltairine de Cleyre, address to the Unity Congregation, Philadelphia, appealing for petitions against the imprisonment of Moses Harman (1890).
Samuel Butler, Notebooks (1951).
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
The first formulation of “the pragmatic maxim,” by C.S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly, v. 12 (January 1878), pp. 286-302.
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics.
One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.
C.S. Peirce, “Pragmatism and Pragmaticism” (1903).
In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don’t remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
Samuel Butler, Speech at the Somerville Club, February 27, 1895.
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
The moral responsibility of the American humorist is the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, and the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence. Thus, the humorist is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges, and all kindred swindles, and is the natural friend of human rights and liberties.
Mark Twain, quoted in Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull, 120.
The governmentalization of charity affects not just the donor but also the recipient. What was once asked as a favor is now demanded as an entitlement. The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, September 6, 2013, at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas.