Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

Have you not observed that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest station in the court, the church, and the law?

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.

I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contribute to our present misery, than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned would contribute to his death; and that the present plentiful harvest, although it should be followed by a dozen ensuing, would no more restore us, than it would the rat aforesaid to put him near the fire, which might indeed warm his fur-coat, but never bring him back to life.