"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light."

"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key."

"Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity."

"The real doth not clip the poet's wings,— To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart Reveals some clue to spiritual things, And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art."

"No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil."

"It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century."

"New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws which in our father's times were best; And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth."

"All thoughts that mould the age begin Deep down within the primitive soul."

"Two meanings have our lightest fantasies, One of the flesh, and of the spirit one."

"Is true Freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake, And, with leathern hearts, forget That we owe mankind a debt? No! true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!"

"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three."

"If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave? If ye do not feel the chain, When it works a brother's pain, Are ye not base slaves indeed, Slaves unworthy to be freed?"

"No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself."

"Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart."

"Be noble! and the nobleness that lies In other men, sleeping but never dead, Will rise in majesty to meet thine own."

"The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment."

"That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing."

"Earth’s noblest thing, — a woman perfected."

"His words were simple words enough, And yet he used them so, That what in other mouths was rough In his seemed musical and low."

"Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown An' peeked in thru' the winder, An there sot Huldy all alone, 'ith no one nigh to hender."

"The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below."

"But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet Lessen like sound of friends’ departing feet; And Death is beautiful as feet of friend Coming with welcome at our journey’s end. For me Fate gave, whate’er she else denied, A nature sloping to the southern side; I thank her for it, though when clouds arise Such natures double-darken gloomy skies."

"Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it."

"When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp."

"The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of the outfit of every honest man."

"The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers, is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience."

"The child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast; Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair."

"They came three thousand miles, and died, To keep the Past upon its throne; Unheard, beyond the ocean tide, Their English mother made her moan."

"There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates."

"From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature’s text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature."

"The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in."

"It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested."

"In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing."

"If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, — and that is a book honestly come by."

"It was the great Frederick Douglass, who had a price on his head, who said “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And echoing his words was the answer of the great abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell: “The limits of tyranny is proscribed by the measure of our resistance to it”."

"The thing he loved most in the world after his country was the English tongue, of which he was an infallible master, and his devotion to which was in fact a sort of agent in his patriotism."

"As life runs on, the road grows strange With faces new, and near the end The milestones into headstones change, 'Neath every one a friend."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it...Opposition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abolitionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent from Spain. However, even the abolitionists believed in the "manifest destiny of the English race," as Lowell put it in 1859, "to occupy this whole continent and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans.""

"Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come."

"These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread."

"There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat."

"The wisest man could ask no more of Fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the Many, honored by the Few; To count as naught in World or Church or State; But inwardly in secret to be great."

"I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir."

"In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity."

"The Maple puts her corals on in May, While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling, To be in tune with what the robins sing."

"It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence."

"The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads."

"An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run."

"Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined."