“History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and most active.”

If we expect to inherit the blessings of our Fathers, we should return a little more to their primitive Simplicity of Manners.

How few have souls capable of so noble an undertaking!

Some disagreeable circumstances that attend my situation.

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.

A little of what you call frippery is very necessary towards looking like the rest of the world.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute

Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.

But such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.

Great learning and superior abilities…will be of little value and small estimation unless virtue, honor, truth, and integrity are added to them.

How difficult the task to quench the fire and the pride of private ambition, and to sacrifice ourselves and all our hopes and expectations to the public weal!

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.

The parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods.

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.

Humble indeed, when compared to the Palaces you have visited, and the pomp you have been witness to.

But like them, may we learn by defeat the power of becoming invincible.

Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.

A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego.

To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.

Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.