Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.

It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age.

Whatever is popular deserves attention.

Those who preached faith, or in other words a pure mind, have always produced more popular virtue than those who preached good acts, or the mere regulation of outward works.

The frivolous work of polished idleness.

Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.

Men are never so good or so bad as their opinions.