Cunning pays no regard to virtue, and is but the low mimic of reason..

What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us!.

Our liberty cannot be taken away unless the people are themselves accomplices..

God himself, with reverence be it spoken, is not an absolute but a limited monarch, limited by the rule which infinite wisdom prescribes to infinite ….

I have observed that in comedies the best actor plays the droll, while some scrub rogue is made the fine gentleman or hero. Thus it is in the farce o….

I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some….

Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and….

History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning..

There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that it is hardly worth while to be her….

No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes right reas….

Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties..

Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract rea….

As well as might we say that a ship is built, loaded and manned for the sake of any particular pilot, instead of acknowledging that the pilot is made….

Worry is the only insupportable misfortune of life..

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their….

A long novitiate of acquaintance should precede the vows of friendship..

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue..

The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age bec….

It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature'….

It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or ….

The fire of my adversity has purged the mass of my acquaintance..