"There is no class in society who can so ill afford to undermine the conscience of the community, or to set it loose from its moorings in the eternal sphere, as merchants who live upon confidence and credit. Anything which weakens or paralyzes this is taking beams from the foundations of the merchant's own warehouse."
"It would almost seem as if there were a certain drollery of art which leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very different one. Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even of Divinity itself. Yet now, what does the window do but mock the separations and proud isolations of Christian men? For there sit the audience, each one taking a separate color; and there are blue Christians and red Christians, there are yellow saints and orange saints, there are purple Christians and green Christians; but how few are simple, pure, white Christians, uniting all the cardinal graces, and proud, not of separate colors, but of the whole manhood of Christ!"
"Every mind is entered, like every house, through its own door."
"Doctrine is nothing but the skin of Truth set up and stuffed."
"Compromise is the word that men use when the Devil gets a victory over
God's cause."
"A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the majority, though he be alone; for God is multitudinous above all populations of the earth."
But this was first said by Frederic Douglas, and better: "One with God is a majority."
"A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it; else the hand would cut itself, which sought to drive it home upon another. The worst lies, therefore, are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true."
"It is not conviction of truth which does men good; it is moral consciousness of truth."
"A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative; but when a nation's young men are so, its funeral-bell is already rung."