[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.

According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.

The two Antonines (for it is of them that we are now speaking) governed the Roman world forty-two years, with the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue. ... Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.

Of human life, the most glorious or humble prospects are alike and soon bounded by the sepulchre.

[Courage] arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength . . .

[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.