Flattery is a foolish suicide; she destroys herself with her own hands.

And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.

[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.

Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.

But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.