“A pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest. ... It can disguise itself as power or property and there is nothing more serious than you are a girl who has neither. 12”

“Wherever you may find the inventor, you may give him wealth or you may take from him all that he has; and he will go on inventing. He can no more help inventing that he can help thinking or breathing.”

“Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't.”

“Darling, family can be the very devil in disguise. More powerful than any drug, more alluring than any sin. They can demand a loyalty that will rip your heart out and chew it up without the thought of an apology.”

“(To the newly graduated)There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time", or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it...Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”

“Power fears truth above all things—more than bullets, more than bombs, more than death itself, because truth can destroy powerful men even as they lie in their graves.”