Quotes

“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.”

“Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.”

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

“The Word of God is the creation we behold; and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.”

“Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.”

“All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny.”

“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”

“It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.”

“It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.”

“He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”

“Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.”

“An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fail; it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the Ocean, that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.”