The individual is better, society is better, and the state is better, for the culture of its citizens; therefore we desire to extend the means for the culture of all.

Address on the morning of 7 October 1868, as quoted by Carl L. Becker, John Wendell Anderson Professor of History at Cornell University from 1917 to 1941, in Cornell University: Founders and the Founding (1943), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, March 1949 reissue, p. 133