A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.

The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.

Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

Have lots of experiments, but make sure they're strategically focused.