Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous consciousness of honor.
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
Compassion, the fairest associate of the heart.
He, who survives his reputation, lives out of despite himself, like a man listening to his own reproach.
The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety.
Christianity is the strangest religion ever set up, for it committed a murder upon Jesus in order to redeem mankind from the sin of eating an apple.
We do not admit the authority of the church with respect to its pretended infallibility, its manufactured miracles, its setting itself up to forgive sins. It was by propagating that belief and supporting it with fire that she kept up her temporal power.
It is a faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object.
He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.
There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.
The final event to himself has been, that as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.
Those words, temperate and moderate, are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.
And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all.
We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and New Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries.
The NT, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act...
The adulterous connection between church and state...
Wrong cannot have a legal descendant.
War ought to be no man’s wish.
There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.