“What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?…Was ever anything so civil?”

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance.

Let no man boast himself that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May.

We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves.

Never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that.

Wine is valued for its price, not its flavor.

Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.

There is such a difference between life and theory.

The double pleasure of pulling down an opponent, and of raising oneself, is the charm of a politician’s life.

Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else, will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places.

Caveat emptor is the only motto going, and the worst proverb that ever came from the dishonest stony-hearted Rome.

The chances are perhaps more in favour of ruin than of success. But, whatever may be the chances, I shall go on as long as any means of carrying on the fight are at my disposal.

But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it?

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites.

As to the origin of civil Societies or Governments; the Author of our Being, has given Man a Nature to be fitted for, and disposed to Society.

But hereof be assured, that all is not lawful nor just that is statute by civil laws; neither yet is everything sin before God, which ungodly persons allege to be treason.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope – that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.

To rob, to ravage, to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.

They make solitude, which they call peace.

I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power.