“The air which is struck with most swiftness by the movable thing is compressed to the greatest degree in itself.”

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Source: History and Class Consciousness (1968), p. 64

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

A Little Conserva-tive (1936)
Context: My individualism was a logical extension of the anarchist principle beyond its narrow application to one particular form or mode of constraint upon the individual. The thing that interested me, as it interested Emerson and Whitman, was a general philosophy of life which regards human personality as the greatest and most respect-worthy object in the world, and as a complete end-in-itself; a philosophy, therefore, which disallows its subversion or submergence, whether by force of law or by any other coercive force. I was convinced that human beings do better and are happier when they have the largest possible margin of existence to regulate and dispose of as they please; and hence I believed that society should so manage itself as to leave the individual a maximum of free choice and action, even at a considerable risk of results which from the short-time point of view would be pronounced dangerous.

Book the First, 24:72
1800s, Milton (c. 1809)

Attributed in Lincoln the Lawyer (1906) by Frederick Trevor Hill — Hill noted that he could find no record of whom Lincoln was insulting.
Posthumous attributions

Henry and Emma; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).