Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.

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 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.

None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.