What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods.
The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.
A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.
There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.