The quote database

The emotions excited by the songs of these thrushes belong to a higher order, springing as they do from our deepest sense of the beauty and harmony of the world.

The greatness and the minuteness of nature pass all understanding.

Nature loves such woods, and places her own seal upon them.

Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.

There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience.

In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession.

Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.

ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.

Want of a common judge with authority, puts all men in a state of nature: force without right, upon a man's person, makes a state of war

For he that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced of the contrary.

No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.

Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another's harm

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.

Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric

Surely the State has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to the most squeamish among us.

Any broader view of this authority would effectively empower a majority to silence dissidents simply as a matter of personal predilections.

The constitutional right of free expression is powerful medicine in a society as diverse and populous as ours.

After listening to it in all kinds of winds, night and day, season after season, I think I could approximate to my position on the mountains by this pine-music alone.

Every feature became more rigidly alpine, without, however, producing any chilling effect; for going to the mountains is like going home.

Standing here in the deep, brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless, as if the work of creation were done.

Nowhere will you see the majestic operations of nature more clearly revealed beside the frailest, most gentle and peaceful things.