If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

The pride of men will not often suffer reason to have scope until it can be no longer of service.

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing as they must if they believe they can do nothing. There is nothing worse because the council of despair is declaration of irresponsibility; it is Pilate washing his hands.

Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity.

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other.

Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.