Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices..

Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; but it is cruel because it is wrong..

The more secure we feel against our liability to any error to which, in fact, we are liable, the greater must be our danger of falling into it..

To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another..

It is quite possible, and not uncommon, to read most laboriously, even so as to get by heart the words of a book, without really studying it at all,-….

When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages..

When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigoro….

A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables..

In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed, we see most dimly the objects which are close around us..

He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion..

Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth..

Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil..

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it..

It is an awful, an appalling thought, that we may be, this moment and every moment, in the presence of malignant spirits..

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, o….

Vices and frailties correct each other, like acids and alkalies. If each vicious man had but one vice, I do not know how the world could go on..

As there are dim-sighted people who live in a sort of perpetual twilight, so there are some who, having neither much clearness of head nor a very ele….

As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contribu….

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity..

Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves..

Christianity, contrasted with the Jewish system of emblems, is truth in the sense of reality, as substance is opposed to shadows, and, contrasted wit….