We begin our public affection in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.
Nothing less will content me, than wholeAmerica.
They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man.
That cardinal virtue, temperance.
Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.
Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters, – that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. This it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations.
I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .
That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.
To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.
And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.
It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.
A jealous lover lights his torch from the firebrand of the fiend.
Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.
There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed upon. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.
Humanity cannot be degraded by humiliation.