In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill informed respecting a question: all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must. And if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully.

The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.

The study of the properties of numbers, Plato tells us, habituates the mind to the contemplation of pure truth, and raises us above the material universe. He would have his disciples apply themselves to this study, not that they may be able to buy or sell, not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or travelling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and to fix them on the immutable essences of things.

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.