When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

It is our first duty to serve society.

It is a maxim that no man was ever enslaved by influence while he was fit to be free.

Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning, for that is sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He'll get better books afterwards.

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.

Security will produce danger.