Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.

Since the primitive times, the wealth of the popes was exposed to envy, their powers to opposition, and their persons to violence.

There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.

The vain, inconstant, rebellious disposition of the people [of Armorica], was incompatible either with freedom or servitude.

[The monks'] minds were inaccessible to reason or mercy . . .

The value of money has been settled by general consent to express our wants and our property, as letters were invented to express our ideas; and both these institutions, by giving a more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent.

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.