“I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.”

“I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

“the mission of men there seems to be,like so many busy demons,to drive the forest out of the country.”

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”

“I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.”