Theodore Parker Quotes
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Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.
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A democracy,- that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.
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As society advances the standard of poverty rises.
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Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.
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The miraculous revelation of the Old Testament and the New, the miracles of famous men, Jews, Gentiles, or Christians, — then Franklin had no religion at all; and it would be an insult to say that he believed in the popular theology of his time, or of ours, for I find not a line from his pen indicating any such belief.
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For a thousand years no king in Christendom has shown such greatness or given so high a type of manly virtue.
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All men desire to be immortal.
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No man is so great as mankind.
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Intellect is stronger than cannon.
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Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself.
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The most useful is the greatest.
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Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end, of the telescope,--the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.
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It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven.
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No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.
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There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.
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Want and wealth equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive away nature from the heart of man.
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In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.
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First there is the democratic idea: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights; that these rights are alienable only by the possessor thereof; that they are equal in men; that government is to organize these natural, unalienable and equal rights into institutions designed for the good of the governed, and therefore government is to be of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. Here government is development, not exploitation.
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Love of truth will bless the lover all his days; yet when he brings her home, his fair-faced bride, she comes empty-handed to his door, herself her only dower.
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Who escapes a duty, avoids a gain.
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Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so.
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Marriages are best made of dissimilar material.
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The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and "only infallible rule" of the nest.
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You may not, cannot, appropriate beauty. It is the wealth of the eye, and a cat may gaze upon a king.
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Politics is the science of urgencies.
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The earnestness of life is the only passport to satisfaction of life.
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Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intellectual, or moral, till it finds a better, and then the loss is a gain. No steps backward is the rule of human history. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, and is a permanent investment for all time.
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Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution.
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The Bible goes equally to the cottage of the peasant, and the palace of the king. - It is woven into literature, and colors the talk of the street. The bark of the merchant cannot sail without it; and no ship of war goes to the conflict but it is there. It enters men's closets; directs their conduct, and mingles in all the grief and cheerfulness of life.
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It seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work.
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