Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

To innovate is not to reform.

A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act.

War is the matter which fills all history; and consequently the only, or almost the only, view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape: and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.