To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Equity money is dynamic and debt money is static.

All the forces of darkness need to succeed ... is for the people to do nothing.

This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.