The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.

What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,--and that is not only true, but identical,--that men always act from self-interest.

Even the law of gravitation would be brought into dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

Reform, that we may preserve.

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.