An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

Scotland by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is connected, but not incorporated, with another country of greater resources.