💬 Quotes

"Institutional architecture matters: until Indigenous nations design governing systems that match their cultural traditions while asserting modern authority, sovereignty remains constrained."

"Decolonization is fundamentally an act of restoration—restoring land, restoring governance, and restoring the stories that anchor a people to their place."

"Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt."

"Growth is the only evidence of life."

"From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: name religion as such, I do not understand it apart from dogma."

"It is the rule of law, not of conscience, that is the daily concern of society; but it is the rule of conscience, not of law, that is the primary concern of religion."

"To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant."

"Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a sort of idol, the supreme authority of human taste and judgment."

"God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

"My father was of the tribe of Judah, a prince among his people; and I am Judah Ben-Hur."

"Mercy is the attribute of kings, but it is also the attribute of God, and it belongs to those who seek Him."

"For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded, first that you make thieves and then punish them?"

"Gold and silver, of which money is made, are so treated that no man values them higher than their true worth; and who does not see that they are far inferior to iron in usefulness?"

"They [the Utopians] define virtue to be a living according to Nature, and think that to this we are bound by God."

"It is not possible that all things should be well, unless all men were good, which I think will not be these many years."

"They wonder much that any man should take so much pleasure in the light of a small twinkling star, when he might behold the sun all day long."

"Where possessions are private, where money measures all things, and all men, however good they may seem, live on the footing of a commonwealth only by name, the public good is swallowed up in private interest."

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."

"The German language, indeed, seems to me a sink of Cimmerian darkness."

"To catch the reader's attention, a man should start out with a bow of a sort that leaves him in no doubt what he's about."