Charles Sumner

Through its untiring energies, the meditation of the closet, or the utterance of the human voice, which else would die away within the precincts of a narrow room, is prolonged to the most distant nations and times, with winged words…

The Press, watchful with more than the hundred eyes of Argus, strong with more than the hundred arms of Briareus, not only guards all the conquests of civilization, but leads the way to future triumphs.

It is immortal as the soul from which it proceeds.

It cannot be crushed by tyranny, or lost by neglect.

It can no longer be confined to a select circle.

Now, at last, through an agency all unknown to Antiquity, knowledge of every kind has become general and permanent.

Thus the knowledge and virtue acquired by individuals were not diffused in their own age or secured to posterity.

The sublime teachings of Plato and Socrates--calculated in many respects to promote the best interests of the race--were limited in influence to a small company of listeners, or to the few who could obtain a copy of the costly manuscripts…

This is natural; for to do right, we must first understand what is right.

Nor is it too much to say, that, except in rare instances, the highest virtue is attained only through intelligence.

Vice and barbarism are the inseparable companions of ignorance.

Without knowledge there can be no sure Progress.

Architecture, sculpture, painting, and vases of exquisite perfection attest an appreciation of beauty in form; but our masters in these things were strangers to the useful arts, as to the comforts and virtues of home.

Even the most illustrious characters, whose names still shine from that distant night, were little more than splendid barbarians.

The people were ignorant, vicious, and poor, or degraded to abject slavery,--itself the sum of all injustice and all vice.

Rome, too, yet lives in her jurisprudence, which, next after Christianity, has exerted a paramount influence over the laws of modern communities.

The eloquence, the poetry, the philosophy, the art, of Athens still survive, and bear no mean sway upon earth.

I would not disparage the triumphs of the ancient mind.

As in Geometry the asymptote constantly approaches its curve, so that the distance between them is constantly diminishing, and yet, though prolonged indefinitely, they never meet, so, according to him, are infinite souls the asymptotes of…

In the infinitude of the universe, he will seem, like Newton, with all his acquisitions, only to have gathered a few pebbles by the seaside.

Knowledge and goodness, his attributes, are infinite; nor can man hope, in any lapse of time, to comprehend this immensity.

But whatever the heights of virtue and intelligence to which he may attain in future ages, who can doubt that to his grander vision new summits will ever present themselves, provoking him to still grander aspirations?

If by this is meant simply that man is capable of indefinite improvement, then it will not be questioned.

Restricting the proposition to the capacity for indefinite improvement, I believe I commend it to the candor and intelligence of all who have meditated upon this subject.

Societies and nations, which are but aggregations of men, and, finally, the Human Family, or collective Humanity, are capable of indefinite improvement.