The ambition which leads me on is an anxious desire and a fixed determination to return to the people unimpaired the sacred trust ...they have confided to my charge; to heal the wounds of the Constitution and preserve it from further violation; to persuade my countrymen, so far as I may, that it is not in a splendid government supported by powerful monopolies and aristocratical establishments that they will find happiness or their liberties protection, but in a plain system, void of pomp, protecting all and granting favors to none, dispensing its blessings, like the dews of Heaven, unseen and unfelt save in the freshness and beauty they contribute to produce. It is such a government that the genius of the people requires; such an [sic] one only under which our states may remain for ages to come united, prosperous, and free.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is an optician, daily having to do with the microscope, telescope, and other inventions for sharpening our natural sight, thus ...enabling us mortals (as I once heard an eccentric put it) liberally to enlarge the field of our original and essential ignorance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when percei...ved, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful--in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason--and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensin...g with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »