Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.

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

In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But theworks of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.

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.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

I consider how little man is, yet, in his own mind, how great. He is lord and master of all things, yet scarce can command anything.