Depend upon it that the lovers of freedom will be free.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.

The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.

It is in the relaxation of security; it is in the expansion of prosperity; it is in the hour of dilatation of the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure, that the real character of men is discerned.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

A man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to choose his subject properly.... But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain to what would be reason and truth if asserted in China.