The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word.

Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract reason of all laws.

I have read somewhere or other, - in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, - that history is philosophy teaching by examples.

Indifference must be a crime in us, to be ranked but one degree below treachery; for deserting the commonwealth is next to betraying it.

God himself, with reverence be it spoken, is not an absolute but a limited monarch, limited by the rule which infinite wisdom prescribes to infinite power.

Cunning pays no regard to virtue, and is but the low mimic of reason.