For all the practical purposes of life, truth might as well be in a prison as in the folio of a schoolman; and those who release her from her cobwebbed shelf and teach her to live with men have the merit of liberating, if not of discovering, her.

A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

He that sympathizes in all the happiness of others, perhaps himself enjoys the safest happiness.

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect: that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm than what will do good.

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

He that is gone so far as to cut the claws of the lion, will not feel himself quite secure, until he has also drawn his teeth.