If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.
What is it that would make a creature as fierce, majestic and powerful as a lion is, subject itself to the intimidation of a man a whip and a chair? The lion has been taught to forget what it is.
I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
As long as I am an American citizen and American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.
Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.
Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.
Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns.
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. ... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights.