If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.

There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.

You deny that man is really so prejudiced as I suppose him; talk to him then of some foreign country, ask him what religion he is of.

Habit is the cement of society, the comfort of life, and, alas! The root of error.

It would be doing cunning too much honor to call it an inferior species of true discernment.

Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.

It is in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt.