As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.

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

What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

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.

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.