Extended excerpt [Speech to the Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa Society]:

“The American doctrine founds liberty in the natural equality of men. The conspiracy against liberty plants itself here and elsewhere upon a denial of that equality. Politicians whose hopes rest upon the popular ignorance and prejudice, and not upon the popular intelligence, furiously sneer at the idea of equality. It is important, therefore, that every man should understand what human equality is. It is an elemental lesson, but the attack is made at the very foundation and must be met there.” (p. 105)

Source link: Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis (1894) online via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/orationsandaddr05curtgoog#page/n121/mode/1up/search/sneer

Extended excerpt [Commencement address]: “Public duty in this country is not discharged, as is so often supposed, by voting. A man may vote regularly and still fail essentially of his political duty, as the Pharisee, who gave tithes of all that he possessed and fasted three times in a week, yet lacked the very heart of religion. When an American citizen is content with voting merely, he consents to accept what is often a doubtful alternative. His first duty is to help shape the alternative.” (p. 267)

Source link: Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, Vol. I (1894) online via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/orationsandaddr05curtgoog#page/n283/mode/1up/search/public+duty+in+this

Extended excerpt [Eulogy for Charles Sumner]:

“Charles Sumner was an educated man, a college-bred man, as all the great Revolutionary leaders of Massachusetts were; and he knew, as every intelligent man knows, that from the day when Themistocles led the educated Athenians at Salamis to that when Von Moltke marshaled the educated Germans against France, the sure foundations of states are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance, and that every sneer at education, at culture, at book-learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin.” (pp. 207-208)

Source note: Charles Sumner (1811-1874) was a popular U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He and Curtis were aligned on many issues, and Sumner was known for his work advocating for education and prison reforms, work building international alliances as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his vocal opposition to slavery.

Source link: Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, Vol. III (1894) online via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/orationsaddresse03curtuoft#page/206/mode/2up/search/sure+foundations

Extended excerpt [Commencement address]:

“While good men sit at home, not knowing that there is anything to be done, nor caring to know; cultivating a feeling that politics are tiresome and dirty, and politicians vulgar bullies and bravoes; half persuaded that a republic is a contemptible rule of a mob, and secretly longing for a splendid and vigorous despotism – then remember it is not a government mastered by ignorance, it is a government betrayed by intelligence; it is not the victory of the slums, it is the surrender of the schools; it is not that bad men are brave, but that good men are infidels and cowards.”(p. 269)

Source link: Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis (1894) online via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/orationsandaddr05curtgoog#page/n285/mode/1up/search/while+good+men+sit