The commodiousness of money is indeed great; but there are some advantages which money cannot buy, and which therefore no wise man will by the love of money be tempted to forego.
Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary’s arguments and putting better in their place.
Wheresoe’er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick’d in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
He that shall peruse the political pamphlets of any past reign will wonder why they were so eagerly read, or so loudly praised.
In all political regulations, good cannot be complete, it can only be predominant.
In such a government as ours no man is appointed to an office because he is the fittest for it – nor hardly in any other government – because there are so many connections and dependencies to be studied.
I have always said the first Whig was the Devil.
He that has once concluded it lawful to resist power, when it wants merit, will soon find a want of merit, to justify his resistance to power.
Some have little power to do good, and have likewise little strength to resist evil.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Remember that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.
The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendor cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate.
What is said upon a subject is gathered from an hundred people.
Let us be quick to repent of injuries while repentance may not be a barren anguish.
Leave to Heaven the measure and the choice.
That what cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.
Repentance, however difficult to be practiced, is, if it be explained without superstition, easily understood. Repentance is the relinquishment of any practice from the conviction that it has offended God.
Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life.
More is learned in a public than in a private school, from emulation. There is the collision of mind with mind, or the radiation of many minds pointing to one center.
To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough.