“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

“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.”

“It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.”

“No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”

“When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”

“It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived. These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.”

“I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.”