When a man tells me God hath spoken in a dream, I know he dreamt that God spoke to him.
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.
They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
There be as many persons of a king, as there be petty constables in his kingdom. And so there are, or else he cannot be obeyed. But I never said that a king, and every one of his persons, are the same substance.
Nature itself cannot err.
For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man’s nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice.
It is not easy to fall into any absurdity, unless it be by the length of an account; wherein he may perhaps forget what went before. For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles.
War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.
Corporations are “worms in the body politic”
By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.
The Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.
The law is the public conscience.
The Enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance, and sown the tares of spiritual errors.
A Covenant not to defend my selfe from force, by force, is always voyd.
For all uniting of strength by private men, is, if for evil intent, unjust; if for intent unknown, dangerous to the Publique, and unjustly concealed.