Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.

Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself

In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race

The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.