Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.
The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that. . . it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
A true patriot will defend his country from its government.
When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.
To demand that a person pee in a cup whenever you wish him to, without a documented reason to suspect that he has been using an illegal drug, is intolerable in our republic. You are saying to him, "I wonder if you are not behaving in a way that I approve of. Convince me that you indeed are. Outrageous. Intolerable.
Have you ever noticed how quiet you get when you go in the woods? It's almost like you know that God's there.
The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.