George William Curtis

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!

— George William Curtis

A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.

— George William Curtis

Happiness lies first of all in health.

— George William Curtis

Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of certain income can indulge.

— George William Curtis

While we read history we make history ... Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer.

— George William Curtis

Government is, unquestionably, a science of compromises, but only of policies and interests, not of essential rights; and if of them, then the sacrifice must fall equally on all.

— George William Curtis

There is no gentleman in America, but he who feels that every man is his equal in natural right, and who does not know that he is cheated if every man does not have fair play.

— George William Curtis

The war has revealed an overpowering national instinct. The conflicting theories of the exact nature and limitations of our government had blinded the shrewdest minds to the fact that we were a nation, with all the feelings and instincts of a nation, and that our quarrels must be settled inside and not outside of the Union.

— George William Curtis

Our national unity was the secret of the force of each of the members. New York could not be New York nor Ohio be Ohio without Massachusetts and without Georgia. And a government which had not the right to coerce had not the right to exist.

— George William Curtis

The foreboding statesman who knew how Greece had fallen asunder and perished, who knew the mean tenure of European leagues, who knew the absolute necessity of union and the jarring jealousies of sections, saw in the Constitution but a shadowy bond which foretold early separation and disaster. It was not strange when the Union was scarcely ten years old, still in the gristle, he heard the serpent of State sovereignty angrily hissing in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of '98.

— George William Curtis

Never fear, true hearts! A people which has shown the quality of its genius as this nation has in the last four years will finish its work. It will go forward and not backward. For our America shall be the Sinai of the nations, and from the terrible thunders and lightnings of its great struggle shall proceed the divine law of liberty that shall subdue and harmonize the world.

— George William Curtis

While we read history we make history.

— George William Curtis

Happiness lies first of all in health.

— George William Curtis