Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new compositions, any bungler can add to the old.
Depend upon it that the lovers of freedom will be free.
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.
In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
Continue to instruct the world; and – whilst we carry on a poor unequal conflict with the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons than other passions and prejudices of our own – convey wisdom to future generations.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.
The only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar minds – success.
The superfluities of a rich nation furnish a better object of trade than the necessities of a poor one. It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.
The ocean is an object of no small terror.
Water is insipid, inodorous, colorless and smooth.
The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treason to virtue.
Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.
Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand.
Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.
Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.
A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.