To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

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

With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.

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.

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.