William Ellery Channing

"In general, we do well to let an opponent's motives alone. We are seldom just to them. Our own motives on such occasions are often worse than those we assail."

"Get wealth if you can by honorable means, and if it do not cost too much. A true cultivation of the mind is fitted to forward you in your worldly concerns, and you ought to use it for this end. Only, …"

"The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves."

"William Ellery Channing at AmericanUnitarian.org"

"Many a man, who has gone but a few miles from home, understands human nature better, detects motives and weighs character more sagaciously, than another who has travelled over the known world, and mad…"

"We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers."

"O, for a voice of power to arouse the human spirit from its death in life of animality, to quicken it with a fit consciousness of its own nature, to lift it to an adequate comprehension of the purpose…"

"It was religion, which, by teaching men their near relation to God, awakened in them the consciousness of their importance as individuals. It was the struggle for religious rights, which opened their …"