You are human and fallible.

On the contrary, I'm a universal patriot, if you could understand me rightly: my country is the world.

I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is (correcting himself), I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience.

What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.

For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity.

There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.

It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.