“They that on glorious ancestors enlarge,
Produce their debt instead of their discharge.”

“Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen? … That debt…is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants…are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.”

“true Christians consider themselves not as satisfying some rigorous creditor, but as discharging a debt of gratitude”

“The slender debt to Nature's quickly paid,
Discharged, perchance, with greater ease than made.”

“The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.”

“Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.”

“A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.”

“Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.”

“By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.”

“Ayn Rand helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.”