The fame that goes with wealth and beauty is fleeting and fragile; intellectual superiority is a possession glorious and eternal.

Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.

Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all - they produced an oyster.

Each man the architect of his own fate.

Sovereignty is easily preserved by the very arts by which it was originally created. When, however, energy has given place to indifference, and temperance and justice to passion and arrogance, then as the morals change so changes fortune.

In my own case, who have spent my whole life in the practice of virtue, right conduct from habitual has become natural.

No mortal man has ever served at the same time his passions and his best interests.