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

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

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

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

I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.

Whenever the spirit of fanaticism, at once so credulous and so crafty, has insinuated itself into a noble mind, it insensibly corrodes the vital principles of virtue and veracity.

Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.