My good friends, while I do most earnestly recommend you to take care of your health and safety, as things most precious to us, I would not have that care degenerate into an effeminate and over-curious attention, which is always disgraceful to a man's self, and often troublesome to others.

The most favourable laws can do very little towards the happiness of people when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them.

England and Ireland may flourish together. The world is large enough for both of us. Let it be our care not to make ourselves too little for it.

There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.

As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.

Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue.

A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is torn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion.