The great national and political revolution of '76 set the seal to the liberties of North America. And but for one evil, and that of immense magnitud… - Frances Wright

Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!

We detect … throughout the whole of things — in the operations of nature, of human society, and in those of our own internal percipient and sentient soul — two master energies. These — while preserving equal forces and acting in conjunction — keep all existences in life, all bodies in place; impart and preserve to each and all their appropriate sphere of action or of movement; and tend, throughout the world of matter, as of mind — to order, harmony, and beauty. Acting in disjunction — i.e. singly, or in opposition — these two principles are transformed into agents of disorder and death; producing variously, violence, inertia, confusion, stagnation, convulsion, decomposition, dissolution. To render this facile of apprehension by every ordinarily informed and reflecting understanding, let us, for a moment, conceive the material universe itself — in which we move and feel and think and have our being, submitted to one only of those universal energies which as considered in disjunction — we call attractive and repellant. Conceive the material universe, I say, submitted to one only of these; it matters not which, for select either, the result must be the same — stagnation, darkness, immovability, universal death.

All learning is useful, all the sciences are curious, all the arts are beautiful; but the most useful, most curious and most beautiful is perfect knowledge and perfect government of oneself.