We are more thoroughly an enlightened people with respect to our political interests than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete everybody will respect you.

Be peaceful be courteous obey the law respect everyone but if someone puts his hand on you send him to the cemetery.

Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.

Everyone should be respected as an individual but no one idolized.

Religion is the idol of the mob it adores everything it does not understand.

Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.

Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom but it isn't alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere.

That means that every human being - without distinction of sex age race skin color language religion political view or national or social origin - possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity.