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.

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

Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.

The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.

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

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.