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The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the greatest and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. I wrote this in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was ignored by those who quoted only the Wealth of Nations.

Omnia aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est. Everything is alien to us — our bodies, our property, our offices, our reputation — time alone is truly ours. Yet we treat our time as though it were infinite, pouring it into others' demands, wasting it on amusements, letting it drain away in anxiety about the future. Dum differtur vita transcurrit: while we...

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over...

I wrote the Declaration in seventeen days, in lodgings on Market Street in Philadelphia, in June 1776. Franklin and Adams made small amendments. Congress made more. They cut the passage condemning the slave trade, which I had included — the king, I wrote, had 'waged cruel war against human nature itself' by introducing slavery to the colonies. This was cut...

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible. To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say. The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds.

God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them.

Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge. Ulysses speaks these words in my Hell because he understood perfectly — and understood too late — that the hunger for experience can become its own damnation.

If a man takes a wife and she bears him no children, and he desires to take a second wife, he may do so but must continue to provide for his first wife. She shall not be driven from the house. The law acknowledges that families break under pressure. Its task is not to prevent all pain but to prevent the strong from leaving the weak without recourse.

Colorado Springs, 1899. I built a magnifying transmitter capable of generating millions of volts and photographed myself reading in the laboratory while artificial lightning twenty metres long crackled above my head. The photograph required a double exposure. I was not actually in the room during the discharge — the current would have killed me.

But the...

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war....

The path of our duty is plain before us—honesty will be found on every experiment to be the best and only true policy—let us then as a Nation be just.

An empire cannot be governed by suspicion alone. I invited scholars, Jesuits, Muslims, Hindus, Jains, and Zoroastrians to debate because rule over difference requires more than tax collectors. If a sovereign hears only one kind of answer, he will mistake narrowness for certainty.