Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.
Though ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness; for it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness for any use.
A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is torn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion.
Thank God, men that art greatly guilty are never wise.
The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best.
Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever; but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.
The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.
Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.
Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.
No men can act with effect who do not act in concert; no men can act in concert who do not act with confidence; no men can act with confidence who are not bound together with common opinions, common affections, and common interests.
The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.
I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.
The question is not whether you have a right to render people miserable, but whether it is not in your best interest to make them happy.
The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
Laws are commanded to hold their tongues among arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.
Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence.
He who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; and he who profits by a superior understanding raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior standing he unites with.
There is a time when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw reverence nor obtain protection.
Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.
Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.