View’d freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, – and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
The real war will never get in the books.
Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of the people.
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.
I say that Democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of arts, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
I no doubt deserved my enemies but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.
Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?
