“Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.”

It is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes.

Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document?

If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.

Instead of yielding to idle conversation it might profit one to cultivate silence and contemplation.

The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery.

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.

Men have always been obliged to fight to preserve liberty. Constitutions and laws do not safeguard liberty. It can be preserved only by a tolerant people, and this means eternal conflict.

None meet life honestly and few heroically.

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

You can only be free if I am free.

For to know all is to understand all, and this leaves no room for judgment and condemnation.

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

When I was a child, if someone had talked to me about buying water, I would have thought it was a joke.

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger.

The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.

I’ve worked with children all my life.

We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.