What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one, – and that is not only true, but identical, – that men always act from self-interest.
The business of everybody is the business of nobody.
He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.
Everybody’s business is nobody’s business.
To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.
A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
The whole history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally.
Such night in England ne’er had been, nor ne’er again shall be.
Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.
A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.
The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.
How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.
That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of.