There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God.

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.

A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.