No government demands so much from the citizens as democracy and none gives back so much.
Life is too short for reading inferior books.
To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.
The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.