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.

Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents

To carry the spirit of peace into war is a weak and cruel policy. When an extreme case calls for that remedy which is in its own nature most violent, and which, in such cases, is a remedy only because it is violent, it is idle to think of mitigating and diluting. Languid war can do nothing which negotiation or submission will do better: and to act on any other principle is, not to save blood and money, but to squander them.

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.