“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

“I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”

“Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time, and that of 20 aids could effect. For while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented. I have thought it better to trust the justice of my country-men, that they would judge me by what they see of my conduct on the stage where they have placed me.”

“I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.”

“I am a sect by myself, as far as I know.”