This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.
By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.
Education is a nation’s cheapest defence.
There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.
Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.
Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.
The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.
Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves.
Of this stamp is the cant of, Not men, but measures.
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing as they must if they believe they can do nothing. There is nothing worse because the council of despair is declaration of irresponsibility; it is Pilate washing his hands.
The men of England,- the men, I mean, of light and leading in England.
Not men but measures a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.
But whoever is a genuine follower of Truth, keeps his eye steady upon his guide, indifferent whither he is led, provided that she is the leader.
The grand instructor, time.
Nothing is so rash as fear; its counsels very rarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate the evils from which it would fly.
In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.