Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.