Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.

Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.

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.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.

We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may veer about: not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system, which by its essence, is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country.

History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.