Quotes from James Russell Lowell

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

All God's angels come to us disguised.

Endurance is the crowning quality…

The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon

I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.

The idol is the measure of the worshipper.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.

Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.

Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? — a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.

Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne—Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.

For a cap and bells our lives we pay,Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking:'Tis heaven alone that is given away,'Tis only God may be had for the asking.

Not only around our infancyDoth heaven with all its splendors lie;Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,We Sinais climb and know it not.