Flattery is no more than what raises in a man’s mind an idea of a preference which he has not.
The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.
Is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed? The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, is more than equal to that task.
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
A populace never rebels from passion for attack, but from impatience of suffering.
Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.
Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.
Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
I do ride contend against the advantages of distrust. In the world we live in, it is but too necessary. Some of old called it the very sinews of discretion.
Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Liberty, without wisdom, is license.
All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
Custom reconciles us to everything.
Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity.