Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.

A dominant religion is never ascetic.

The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.

The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.

Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.

More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.

A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.