To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.

A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.

There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.

History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires.

Boswell is the first of biographers.