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.
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.
I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.
The interests of large classes had been unfavourably affected by the establishment of the new diligences; and, as usual, many persons were, from mere stupidity and obstinacy, disposed to clamour against the innovation, simply because it was an innovation. It.
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures.
The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the humanity which remedies them.
First, a man of sense would have known that a single experiment is not sufficient to establish a general rule even in sciences much less complicated than the science of government; that, since the beginning of the world, no two political experiments were ever made of which all the conditions were exactly alike; and that the only way to learn civil prudence from history is to examine and compare an immense number of cases.