If we are more affected by the ruin of a palace than by the conflagration of a cottage, our humanity must have formed a very erroneous estimate of the miseries of human life.

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.

[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.

In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.

The brutal soldiers satisfied their sensual appetites without consulting either the inclination or the duties of their female captives; and a nice question of casuistry was seriously agitated, Whether those tender victims, who had inflexibly refused their consent to the violation which they sustained, had lost, by their misfortune, the glorious crown of virginity. There were other losses indeed of a more substantial kind and more general concern.