It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.
The aphorism "Whatever is, is right," would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Human law cannot punish or forbid all evil, since while doing away with evils it would do away with many good things, which would hinder the advance of the common good.
Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.
The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.
Americans have always held firm, because we have always believed in certain truths. We know that if evil is not confronted, it gains in strength and audacity and returns to strike us again. We know that when the work is hard, the proper response is not retreat, it is courage. And we know that a great ideal of human freedom entrusted to us in a special way and that the ideal of liberty is worth defending.
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.