“An injustice to one is a threat made to all”

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.

When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.

We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school-masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.

When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.

Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.

Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.

In the matter of dress one should always keep below one’s ability.

That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth. They tend to go as far as the barriers will allow.

It is unreasonable … to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was impossible for me to execute myself.

Love of the republic in a democracy, is a love of the democracy; love of the democracy is that of equality. Love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality.

The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin’ orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother’s womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

Marriage is a very sacred institution and should not be degraded by allowing every other type of relationship to be made equivalent to it.

It is true that we are made of dust. And the world is also made of dust. But the dust has motes rising.

They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn’t inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better – the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams.

A man would prefer to come home to an unmade bed and a happy woman than to a neatly made bed and an angry woman.

Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.

We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now — and we’re going to try our hands at it.