No nation can last which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.

God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.

Once thoroughly our own, the knowledge ceases to give us pleasure.

But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work.

Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.