If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.

There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors.

Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.

In politics the middle way is none at all.