Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company; but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.

In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and knaves; who, singly from their number, must to a certain degree be respected, though they are by no means respectable.

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide.