Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd suppose.

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.

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

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.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.

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