John Jay Chapman

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same - hardihood. Give them raw truth.

Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.

We cannot hand our faith to one another. ... Even in the Middle Ages when faith was theoretically uniform it was always practically individual.

As for boredom ... I notice that it leaves me as soon as I am doing something that has got to be done.