What is so beneficial to the people as liberty, which we see not only to be greedily sought after by men, but also by beasts, and to be prepared in all things.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Once you learn to hit, teach yourself to never miss again.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

It was one of the few stories we told the same way.

There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.

A benefactor is a representative of God.

I've discovered that the less I say, the more rumors I start.

Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.

But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.

It was not a healthy marriage for long time. It was never about another man, it was about what my and Dennis's relationship could not sustain.

Heaven speed the canvas, gallantly unfurl'd, To furnish and accommodate a world, To give the Pole the produce of the sun, And knit the unsocial climates into one.