The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events

The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.

Such, indeed, is the policy of civil war: severely to remember injuries, and to forget the most important services. Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.

Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.

[Whole] generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in the space of a single hour.

A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.