If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think ... to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.

Conscription is the vitality of a nation, the purification of its morality, and the real foundations of all its habits.

All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

Society is impossible without inequality, inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.

Well, then, had I been at Martinique, I should also have been on the side of the English, because above all things it is necessary to save one's life. I am for the whites, because I am white; I have no other reason, yet that is reason good enough. How was it possible to grant liberty to the Africans, to men without any kind of civilization, who did not even know what a colony meant, or that there was such a place as France?