Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it's set a rolling it must increase.

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

It is the briefest yet wisest maxim which tells us to meddle not.

There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.

Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.