Truth can hardly be expected to adapt herself to the crooked policy and wily sinuosities of worldly affairs; for truth, like light, travels only in straight lines.

Butler compared the tongues of these eternal talkers to race-horses, which go the faster the less weight they carry.

Attempts at reform, when they fail, strengthen despotism, as he that struggles tightens those cords he does not succeed in breaking.

Some reputed saints that have been canonized ought to have been cannonaded.

We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.

The upright, if he suffer calumny to move him, fears the tongue of man more than the eye of God.

The policy that can strike only while the iron is hot will be overcome by that perseverance, which ... can make that iron hot by striking and he that can only rule the storm must yield to him who can both raise and rule it.