The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.

To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes.

If any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by his own authority and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government.

Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them.

Long discourses, and philosophical readings, at best, amaze and confound, but do not instruct children. When I say, therefore, that they must be treated as rational creatures, I mean that you must make them sensible, by the mildness of your carriage, and in the composure even in the correction of them, that what you do is reasonable in you, and useful and necessary for them; and that it is not out of caprichio, passion or fancy, that you command or forbid them any thing.

Action is the great business of mankind, and the whole matter about which all laws are conversant.

You shall find, that there cannot be a greater spur to the attaining what you would have the eldest learn, and know himself, than to set him upon teaching it his younger brothers and sisters.