It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.

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

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.

Obstinacy, sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues--constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness--are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so just an abhorrence; and in their excess all these virtues very easily fall into it.

Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the character of the age.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.