To reduce man to the duties of his own city, and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race.
I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.
When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself.