O powerful goodness! Bountiful Father! Merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to thy other children as the only return in my power for thy continual favours to me.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part.

The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions, for life is a kind of chess.

It is the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins.

Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.

'Tis more noble to forgive, and more manly to despise, than to revenge an Injury.