Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?

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

So true it is, that nature has caprices which art cannot imitate.

Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

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.