He that has once concluded it lawful to resist power, when it wants merit, will soon find a want of merit, to justify his resistance to power.

History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.

What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.

Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

Almost all the moral good which is left among us is the apparent effect of physical evil.

The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature, with resistless weapons, and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea.