“The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.”

“All we ask is to be let alone.”

“Not mine, oh, Lord, but thine.”

“If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.”

“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.”

“When we see religion split into so many thousand of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself.[Letter to George Logan, 12 November 1816]”

“to see beauty is to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is. beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?”