Walter Bagehot: “Commerce brings this mingling of ideas, this breaking down of old creeds, and brings it inevitably.”

The United States could not have become monarchical, even if the Constitutional Convention had decreed it, even if the component States had ratified it.

He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.

Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.