“A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.”

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.

Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.

Advice is seldom welcome. Those who need it most, like it least.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.

Language is the dress of thought; every time you talk your mind is on parade.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

There are two types of knowledge. One is knowing a thing. The other is knowing where to find it.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

Even in the best and most peacefully civilized countries many occasions arise when a woman versed in the knowledge and use of fire arms may find that information and skill of great importance.

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The whites, who are educated and civilized, swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write.

Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.

The most base of men can be civilized through suffering.