My Own Feeling Of Concern

The Last Degree Of Honesty Has Always Been, And Is Still Considered Incompatible With Statesmanship. To Hunger And Thirst After Righteousness Has Been Naturally, As It Were, Supposed A Disqualification For Affairs.

It Is Not Quite True That There Are No Good Letters Written In America: Among My Own Circle Of Correspondents There, There Are Ladies And Gentlemen Whose Letters Would Stand A Comparison With Any For Frankness, Grace, And Epistolary Beauty Of Every Kind. But I Am Not Aware Of Any Medium Between This Excellence And The Boarding-school Insignificance Which Characterizes The Rest.

Who Is Apt, On Occasion, To Assign A Multitude Of Reasons When One Will Do? This Is A Sure Sign Of Weakness In Argument.

It Matters Infinitely Less What We Do Than What We Are.

Public Opinion, - A Tyrant, Sitting In The Dark, Wrapt Up In Mystification And Vague Terrors Of Obscurity; Deriving Power No One Knows From Whom ... - But Irresistible In Its Power To Quell Thought, To Repress Action, To Silence Conviction.