“Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor.”

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.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good.

Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one’s own sins.

The rate of profit is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.

The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying ‘anywhere but here’.

Whores don’t live in company of poor men, citizens never support a weak company and birds don’t build nests on a tree that doesn’t bear fruits.

The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.

Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct.