I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind.

Rain is good for vegetables, and for the animals who eat those vegetables, and for the animals who eat those animals.

Every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of its original constitution.

Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us.

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

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadsul than its extinction.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.