"Against all these assertions Grotius published to the world a demonstration that no such rights could exist. His whole argument was mainly a development of two postulates. The first of these was that the right of nations to communicate with one another had been universally recognized; that it was based on a fundamental law of humanity; that the liberty of the sea being necessary to enable nations to communicate with one another, it could not be taken away by any power whatever. The second was that every attempt to make an ocean highway a monopoly of any single nation is forbidden by the immensity of the sea, its lack of stability, its want of fixed limits. This argument in places seemed thin. The book , after the custom of the time, was filled with an array—far more than sufficient—of learned citations; but its most significant feature—that which went to make it the herald of a new epoch—was that it took its stand upon the inalienable rights of mankind,—that it mainly deduced these rights neither from revelation nor from national enactments, but from natural law as ascertained by human reason."

“Never was there a more perfect demonstration of the truth asserted by Daniel Webster, that, of all contrivances for defrauding the working people of a country, arbitrary issues of paper money are the most effective.”

“He avoided another danger as serious as his precocity had been. He steered clear of the quicksands of useless scholarship, which had engulfed so many strong men of his time. The zeal of learned men in that period was largely given to knowing things not worth knowing, to discussing things not worth discussing, to proving things not worth proving. Grotius seemed plunging on, with all sails set, into these quicksands; but again his good sense and sober judgment saved him: he decided to bring himself into the current of active life flowing through his land and time, and with this purpose he gave himself to the broad and thorough study of jurisprudence.”

“The young man destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought; his studies, his reading, his professors, his associates, all were combined to keep from him any results of observation or reflection save those prescribed: probably, of all means for stifling healthy and helpful thought, a theological seminary, as then conducted—whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, was the most perfect.”

“The theologians who took up the work which the first reformers had laid down soon came to consider intolerance as a main evidence of spiritual life: erelong they were using all their powers in crushing every germ of new thought. Their theory was simply that the world had now reached its climax; that the religion of Luther was the final word of God to man; that everything depended upon keeping it absolutely pure; that men might comment upon it in hundreds of pulpits and lecture rooms and in thousands of volumes;—but change it in the slightest particle—never. And in order that it might never be changed it was petrified into rituals and creeds and catechisms and statements, and, above all, in 1579, into the "Formula of Concord," which, as more than one thoughtful man has since declared, turned out to be a "formula of discord.”

“Educational theories of Andrew Dickson White”

“Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.”