The temple of silence and reconciliation.

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

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.

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

A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.