If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

I believe in deeply ordered chaos

... wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity.

States are great engines moving slowly.

It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.