A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.

The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

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.