Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.

Freedom without virtue is not freedom but license to pursue whatever passions prevail in the intemperate mind; man's right to freedom being in exact proportion to his willingness to put chains upon his own appetites; the less restraint from within, the more must be imposed from without.

Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn.

The grave is a common treasury, to which we must all be taken.

It is by sympathy we enter into the concerns of others, that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy may be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.

For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever

[Slavery] is a weed that grows in every soil.