Category: Thought

A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be really free.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

Independence forever. Thomas Jefferson survives.

Reporters aren’t stupid. We were standing around talking about which of the 900 health-care proposals that nobody’s going to accept is that day’s hot news. They know how silly that is. But that’s what they do. And if they don’t do it, they’ll get fired and someone else will do it. There’s tremendous pressure, if you’re in that system, to be involved and be interested and to care about it. There’ s no room to say, “This is stupid.”