The marketplace obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success.

Prudence is a quality incompatible with vice, and can never be effectively enlisted in its cause.

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.

For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when men are left no way of ascertaining their profits but by their means of obtaining them, those means will be increased to infinity.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

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.