An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

In his comic scenes, Shakespeare seems to produce, without labor, what no labor can improve.

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate

His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.

Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.