That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

Office of itself does much to equalize politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.

The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.

No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.

It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

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.